According to a casting announcement from the BBC, the broadcaster has revealed its lead cast for Open Water, the eight-part television adaptation of Caleb Azumah Nelson’s acclaimed debut novel, with filming now underway across Birmingham and London. Emmy-nominated Ted Lasso star Toheeb Jimoh and newcomer Dujonna Gift will play Marcus and Effie, the two young Black British artists at the center of the novel’s love story. Jimoh, who made his screen debut in the BBC’s Jimmy McGovern-penned drama Anthony and most recently appeared in Industry, plays Marcus, a retail worker developing a career as a photographer; Gift, making her lead television debut after a supporting turn in Disney’s 2025 Snow White and a stint in the West End’s Two Strangers, plays Effie, a dance student navigating her own entanglements.

We’ve been tracking this adaptation since it was first announced last year, when Caleb Azumah Nelson was confirmed to write, direct, and executive produce the series himself, a rare degree of creative control for an author adapting his own work. Produced by Mam Tor Productions (a Banijay UK company) and B-Side Productions for BBC iPlayer and BBC One, the series retains the novel’s central premise: Marcus and Effie share an immediate, undeniable connection complicated by Effie’s relationship with Marcus’s close friend Samuel, with a shared project photographing Black creatives in London pulling the two further into each other’s orbit.

The supporting cast rounds out with Jayden Fowora-Knight, Janina Elkin, Sherise Blackman, Matthew Dunster, Neve McDonnell, Javier Bonaparte, Beaux Bryant, and Mo Sesay. Speaking on the casting news, Caleb Azumah Nelson described the process of bringing Open Water from page to screen as amazing, noting the rarity of love stories like this one and the depth of care the cast and crew have poured into the production. Jimoh, for his part, called it a dream project, pointing to how sensitively the story handles the textures of the south London he grew up in.

Open Water has had a considerable run since its 2021 publication by Viking Press, winning the Costa First Novel Award, Debut Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, and earning longlist nods for the Desmond Elliott and Gordon Burn prizes, won the Dylan Thomas Prize among other honors. That track record, paired with Nelson’s own creative stewardship of the adaptation, has made this one of the more closely watched literary-to-screen transitions coming out of the UK’s Black British literary scene in recent years.

We are excited to see how Marcus and Effie’s story translates to the screen under Nelson’s own direction, and we’ll be watching closely as more details and eventually, a release date, come into view.