Offscript With Nicole Asinugo
The award-winning screenwriter and film director on finding freedom through constant reinvention.
“I look at young people; everybody just wants to get paid. And I understand that you need money. But at the same time, there's a childlikeness that comes with creativity and comes with that experimentation without a profit motive.”
Nicole Asinugo’s career proves creativity isn’t about sticking to one path. From law to advertising, advocacy to global events, and now to Nollywood, she has consistently given herself permission to stop, switch, and start over whenever a path no longer felt fulfilling. What ties it all together is her instinct for storytelling, even if the form or stage kept changing.
Growing up between Eastern and Southern Nigeria and the United Kingdom, she was always the child who loved stories, whether reading, retelling, or even performing them. “I was very much a storyteller when I was younger. I would entertain guests when they came, reciting dialogue from films. I liked to be the centre of attention for anyone listening.” Her father, in particular, encouraged her love of reading. During one school holiday, he returned home with a sack of books for her to devour.
She excelled in art subjects such as literature and history in school, making law seem like the natural path. The legal thrillers she read and television shows about smart lawyers made the profession look exciting. But in her first class at the University of Nottingham, she knew she had made a mistake. Still, she didn't quit. She completed her degree after four years instead of the required three and then attended the Nigerian Law School.
On the side, she kept writing: a blog in university and a travel magazine during law school. When the first issue came out and she showed it to her father, he was supportive and encouraged her to keep going. “I realised he just wanted me to be good at something. Law wasn't the hill I needed to die on.”
From then on, she leaned into storytelling. She spent a year as a news writer at Channels Television, where she discovered that she wasn't cut out for journalism. Then she saw the TV series Mad Men.
“I saw Don Draper and Peggy Olson in this cool office, drinking, smoking, coming up with ideas. And I was like, 'This is what I want to be.’” She discovered that DDB, the agency the show was based on, had an office in Lagos, so she applied to work there. Even though she did not have the necessary skills, the agency’s creative director decided to take a bet on her, initially offering a two-week unpaid internship. Those two weeks became three years and laid the foundation for her career as a creative.
While working at DDB, she stayed committed to her other creative experiments. She styled friends for shoots just for fun, and blogs like BellaNaija or Guardian Life would pick them up. This experience would come in handy when GT Bank decided to launch its content vertical, Ndani TV. She was tapped to lead the publication as the first managing editor.
While working at Ndani TV, a trip to Dubai sparked her curiosity about opportunities abroad. She didn’t want to return to advertising and wasn’t sure where she fit, so she began sending out applications for editorial roles at publications. But she only got rejections, and they all said the same thing: no cultural context, no local experience.
Then she stumbled across an ad for the Dubai Expo 2020. With no clear role in mind, she uploaded her CV to the portal and hoped for the best. Two months later, the UAE government called.
While previous expos had grouped all the African countries together, the UAE government wanted each country to have its own dedicated exhibition at Expo 2020. Nicole was the first hire on that storytelling team, helping craft the exhibitions of 10 African countries. When Expo 2020 ended, she still had a role at the UAE’s Ministry of International Cooperation, but she had begun to get antsy again.
“It was the coolest job in the world. But it was also political. You were speaking on behalf of the UAE.” After a while, it felt almost like law school again — serious meetings, serious people — and the creative in her wanted something else.
She pivoted again, this time into event storytelling with Global Citizen, where she worked on campaigns and concerts in Accra, Paris, and New York.
By now, another path had already begun to take shape. In 2015, Charles Okpaleke, CEO of Play Network Studios, acquired the rights to remake the Nollywood cult classic Living in Bondage. He needed a screenwriter, and Nicole offered to help. She wrote the film’s first draft, but it didn't move into production until three years later, with another writer revising her script.
When Living in Bondage: Breaking Free premiered in 2019, it was a massive success. Nicole won the 2020 Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Award for Best Screenplay alongside director CJ Obasi. Building on the success of Living in Bondage, she also wrote Rattlesnake, another Charles Okpaleke film, which went on to win five awards at the 2022 AMVCA.
But even with the acclaim she had received for her storytelling roles and the awards she had won for her screenwriting, she still could not shake the feeling that something was missing.
“I still felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to fix plot holes. I didn’t feel like a professional, even after winning Best Writer at the AMVCA.”
So she went back to school, this time to the New York Film Academy. For the first time, she learnt the mechanics of writing for film. It changed how she saw Nollywood. “That was the first time I learned how to analyse scripts. And I realised that for the most part we are winging it in Nollywood. On the technical side, we know what we’re doing. But in writing, not so much.”
Determined to change that, Nicole launched WriteGoodStories, a platform for writers to workshop and develop their work professionally without pressure from production companies.
The lab has since run workshops, retreats, and residencies, for writers. But more than a storytelling lab, WriteGoodStories is also a communications agency helping organisations like Global Citizen and other corporate brands build their narrative strategy.
But Nicole isn't done reinventing. In May, she made her directorial debut with God Knows Best, which screened at the 2025 Cannes Festival. The film was shot in Yoruba, a language she doesn’t speak fluently. Originally drafted in English, she felt the story demanded otherwise. “English just felt wrong for the characters,” she says. “It wasn’t true to the story.”
On set, she leaned on a Yoruba-speaking supervisor, but also on instinct. “I didn’t need to understand every word to know if the delivery was off. If a line was meant to be soft, and the actor was too forceful, I could tell.”
That instinct, knowing when something fits, and when it doesn’t, runs through her career. From law to advertising to Nollywood, she has refused to stay anywhere that dulls her creative spark. Reinvention, for her, isn’t about failure or crisis. It’s the rhythm of a creative life: experiment, outgrow, move on, begin again.