Where imitating Adesua landed me – Etinosa Idemudia cries out

Nollywood actress Etinosa Idemudia has doled out some advice about imitation and comparison, especially at the start of one’s career.

The actress highlighted why one must be very careful when listening to their voice instead of too other’s advice.

She revealed this during an interview with Arise TV as she disclosed the story of how she was told to imitate actress Adesua Etomi and be more ‘serious’ instead of doing ‘razz, Benin’ accents.

Here’s what she said about how that advice affected her, the journey she went on, and the lesson she ultimately learned.

In Etinosa Idemudia’s words:

“See, my people, in life, just listen to your spirit. Too many advice can cause problems for you in life. When I was getting a lot of attention in Nollywood, some filmmakers were telling me things like ‘why are you doing comedy?’, ‘why are you doing skits?’, ‘you look like Adesua, be doing roles like Adesua. You need to be packaged, you need to behave well.’ That time, I was doing that my Benin accent, and they were like why are you doing razz things? You’re too fine to do comedy. Then they mentioned some female comedy people that it fits them, but me, I need to start doing photoshoot and packaging, that I should not ‘mumu’ myself.

So that caused a lot of confusion and conflict in my head back then, trying to figure out should I package and speak English? Or should I keep on doing my razz accent? So I stopped for a while. I said I was not going to do skits again. I’m just going to be doing serious Nollywood. I would even have some of my colleagues at that time who I’d want to put in my skits that would tell me ‘no, I want to be a serious actor. I’m not doing skit. I don’t want any producer to think I’m not serious in life.’

But look at 2024, look at those same people. All those ones that adviced me against it are now doing skits. Hypocrisy! So when you’re growing, don’t listen to any person o! Just follow your God given destiny and pray to God for your own ideas. Now, I’m doing my skits, I’m doing my serious films, and I’m doing everything I want to do. I’m telling my stories my own way with no distractions.”