Why I left a corporate job to pursue a career in acting— Deyemi Okanlawon

Deyemi Okanlawon, one of Nigeria’s finest and talented actors, has opened up about how he left a corporate job to make a living out of acting.

Deyemi has been in almost every single blockbuster production out of Nigeria. From Blood Sisters to Brotherhood to Elesin Oba.

During a recent interview with Top Charts Africa, he revealed that acting has always been what he wanted to do since childhood.

His words:

As an actor I’m an entrepreneur, a creative enterpreneur. I offer a very valuable mix of services, my craft, my business experience and my brand reputation, to producers and audiences as well as brands and business partners. 

My first memories of acting was when I was four or five years old in primary school plays that you ever saw. On campus I got involved with a faith based drama group and I was the head of the youth drama department at my church which I took it quite seriously – it was my ministry and what I believed at that time to be my purpose and one of the many things God wanted me to do.

 At first I was having fun and then it became something I really truly loved and became passionate about – all the while I didn’t realize that I was honing a skill. After dabbling from 2010 and seeing an opportunity in the space, I quit my job as the head of marketing in OLX in 2013 to pursue a career in acting. My engineering mind plus my experience in sales and marketing allowed me to strategize and do things differently. 

I’m very methodical in the way that I approach everything from reading scripts and breaking down characters and stories, to figuring out solutions to my business challenges, to discovering new services I can render to producers and brands.