Amol Rajan Interviews

Amol Rajan speaks to actor Ian McKellen, one of the most celebrated performers of his generation and someone who has long defied convention and expectation. In this probing hour-long interview, Rajan asks the man who played Gandalf about growing up in Lancashire during the Second World War, launching his acting career at Cambridge alongside Derek Jacobi, and finally choosing to publicly reveal the truth about his sexuality in 1988. Regularly lauded as the heir to Laurence Olivier, McKellen is just as comfortable analysing the intricacies of Shakespearian drama as he is revealing the debt his X-Men films owe to the civil rights movements. He tells Rajan about what it was like to be part of the first gay kiss on BBC Television in 1970 and mulls on his own mortality in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Amol Rajan speaks to musician Nile Rodgers. As a songwriter and producer, Rodgers has worked on worldwide hits including David Bowie's Let's Dance, Madonna's Like a Virgin, Sister Sledge's We Are Family and Daft Punk's Get Lucky. Rodgers tells Rajan about his childhood in 1960s New York City, with his mother only fourteen years older than him, falling prey to drug addiction as she brought up her young son. Rajan finds out about the circumstances around Rodgers setting up the band Chic with his musical partner Bernard Edwards and the story behind their sensational record Le Freak. As one of the most successful black men in the music industry, Rodgers reflects on the racism which still troubles America and the structural inequalities that come with music streaming, and he tells Rajan about the death of his mother in 2020.

Amol Rajan speaks to Sharon White, chairman of the John Lewis Partnership. Overseeing a team of 80,000 partners working at branches and offices of supermarket Waitrose and department store John Lewis around the country, White took over the retailer in February 2020, just weeks before the coronavirus lockdown forced her to shut shops all over the UK. During her two years in the role, she has had to close 16 branches of John Lewis and make many staff redundant in response to the unprecedented economic circumstances of the time. White tells Rajan about her upbringing in Leyton as the daughter of a Windrush generation family, her time at Cambridge University, her fast rise to the top of the civil service and her position as chief executive of media regulator Ofcom. After discussing topics like code-switching, class and social mobility, White and Rajan visit her childhood home and branches of John Lewis and Waitrose, before she shows him around the partnership's main distribution centre, Magna Park in Milton Keynes, to show him a vision of the future of online retail.

Amol Rajan talks to a true game changer: Billie Jean King. A record-breaking tennis player on the court, and a boundary-busting social activist off the court, King dominated tennis whilst campaigning to get the women's sport recognised and female athletes treated as equal to the men. At her spiritual home of Wimbledon - where she holds the record for most career wins - King talks to Rajan about her lifelong battle for equality and inclusion, and how she has balanced her activism with both a record-breaking sports career and a tumultuous personal life.