Chiwetel Ejiofor

Chiwetel Ejiofor: it’s always the quiet ones...

Chiwetel Ejiofor, often hailed as Britain’s ’first black movie star’, moves from Hollywood blockbusters to Shakespeare without missing a beat - or once bragging about it. ’I could have been a priest in an alternative universe,’ he tells Stuart Husband. Portrait by Eva Vermandel

As Chiwetel Ejiofor ambles into the upmarket West End restaurant, a quote from D.H. Lawrence springs to mind: ’One’s action ought to come out of an achieved stillness.’ Everything about Ejiofor is understated, from his contained demeanour to his workmanlike, if well-cut, jeans and T-shirt combo and his soft, well-modulated speaking voice. But as he ponders the menu and dazzles the waiting staff -’Hmmm, monkfish I think, with just a tomato and onion salad on the side?’ he says, his full-beam grin and fluttering, expressive fingers working on them like a benediction - his natural charisma is laid bare.

Magnetism is a useful quality for an actor to have, particularly when it seems effortless; thus, it’s not surprising that even the most hard-bitten of critics and directors have long been lauding the 30-year-old Ejiofor as one of the finest practitioners of the art, but also as ’Britain’s first genuine black movie star.’ In role after role - the troubled immigrant Okwe in Stephen Frears’s movie Dirty Pretty Things, his breakthrough stage appearance as a schizophrenic in Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange at the National Theatre in 2000 (for which he won both Olivier and Evening Standard awards), even his comparatively showboating turn as a drag queen in the 2005 film Kinky Boots - Ejiofor has shown a knack for nailing what Frears calls ’the ability to act between the lines, to edge subtly into the nuance beneath the nuance’.

He’s appeared in hit after hit (Notting Hill, Children of Men, Inside Man), yet we’re still obliged to print phonetic pronunciation primers of his name (Chew-ih-tell Edge-ee-oh-four, usually shortened to ’Chewy’; his first name means ’God brings’ in Igbo, the native tongue of his Nigerian parents). One reason could be that he prizes some very un-movie star virtues such as anonymity and flexibility.

’I like to disappear into a role,’ he says, choosing his words painstakingly. ’I equate the success of it with a feeling of being chemically changed.’ He grins sheepishly. ’That’s the only way I can express it. You search for the essence of a character - like with Okwe, I didn’t know how to get to the heart of him until I went shopping for him in Shepherd’s Bush market. I found a shirt for him, but it was only when I did the top button up that everything fell into place.’ He shrugs. ’It’s a strange thing, but you get this click in your brain; the wonderful feeling that the entirety of a character is suddenly available and accessible to you.’

Ejiofor’s DNA has been getting particularly knotty of late, with a slew of meaty parts. In two upcoming movies, Talk to Me and American Gangster, he plays a couple of real-life witnesses to recent, troubled American black history in his characteristically protean way (aided by the requisite wardrobe barrage of tab collars, pimp furs and Afros). In Talk to Me he’s Dewey Hughes, a buttoned-up radio executive who strikes up an enduring friendship with Don Cheadle’s original black shock-jock in the late 1960s. In Ridley Scott’s blood-soaked tale of the Harlem heroin trafficker and mafia supplanter Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), set at broadly the same time, Ejiofor is Washington’s ’key fraternal accomplice’ Huey Lucas (as he says, he only needs to play a Louis to have the full Donald Duck-nephew set). And at the end of November he starts a Donmar Warehouse run in the title role of Othello, under the auspices of Donmar artistic director Michael Grandage, alongside Kelly Reilly as Desdemona and Ewan McGregor as Iago.Tickets for the entire three-month run sold out in a matter of minutes. advertisement

’They’re pretty good jobs,’ he says - this is about as grandstanding as Ejiofor ever gets - while pensively tugging on the beard he’s growing for Othello. ’In Talk to Me, you’ve got a sweeping historical background - civil rights and race riots - but the foreground is really about these two guys’ great and enduring friendship, which is a surprisingly rare thing to focus on in a movie. And it was a great opportunity to work with people I really admired, Don Cheadle especially.’

American Gangster, he says, had a totally different feel. ’The whole thing was epic in scale and scope. There were an extraordinary number of locations, from Harlem to Thailand, and there was a sense of being constantly on the move, getting everything done, with the world whizzing by in a blur. And there’s Ridley in the middle of it all, seemingly very relaxed, like a general deploying his various squadrons.’

He shakes his head incredulously. ’It was mind-boggling.’

It may have been a kind of relief, after this brush with the military-industrial approach to creativity, for Ejiofor to get back to the comparatively homespun scale with a run at the 250-seat Donmar. It also gives him a chance to revisit a role he first played for the National Youth Theatre at 18, when, he’s previously said, ’I felt I didn’t really do it justice because I’d never experienced a memorable kind of jealousy at that point.’

So does he feel he has more to draw on now?

’Oh, definitely,’ he grins. ’I have a lot more access now. Though the jealousy in the play is in this full-on grand-operatic style, it’s all-consuming and maddening. Shakespeare was completely aware of how these emotions can devastate and destroy people. It’s so exciting to step into the minds of these characters.’

As a black actor, does he find Othello lurking in the back of his mind, like K2 out there, waiting to be conquered? ’Let’s just say that I never felt playing him at 18 was the end of the story. I’ve always been aware that, if I stuck at it, I might revisit him some day. And I couldn’t think of a better way of doing it. We’ve got a great theatre, Ewan as Iago, a really strong team, and plenty of buzz building. We’ve got every chance of producing something good,’ he concludes, with the briefest of please-God heavenward glances.

Michael Grandage concurs; he previously worked with Ejiofor on a Royal Court production of Noël Coward’s The Vortex, as well as with McGregor on the Donmar’s Guys and Dolls, and was prepared to wait nearly three years for the suitable windows to appear in his principals’ diaries.

’It’s fair to say that this production wouldn’t have happened without Chiwetel’s involvement,’ he says during a break in rehearsals. ’I’d admired him for a long time and actively pursued him for The Vortex, which is when we first talked about doing Othello. He’s got a range that very few actors have in one package, from a natural ability to an innate versatility. He seems to wipe the slate entirely clean with every part he does. And he’s quite an enigma; you can’t read him easily, which for a director and an audience is phenomenally interesting.’

He laughs. ’Some actors are born, not made, and I think Chiwetel’s definitely one of them.’

Ejiofor himself puts it more prosaically: ’I don’t actually know how to do anything else.’ He was born in Forest Gate, east London, the second of four children. His mother, Obiajulu, was a pharmacist; his father, Arinze, a doctor and part-time singer - an intriguing, if glancing, showbiz precedent. According to Obiajulu, her second son was ’a sweet child who did what he was told, was independent and very artistic.’ Ejiofor smiles wanly at this maternal recollection. ’I was the classic middle child in some ways, the one who could have been a priest in an alternate universe. Being in the middle was kind of safe; my elder brother, Obinze, looked after me, so I felt free to go my own way.’

In 1988, when Ejiofor was 11, the family went back to Nigeria for a family wedding; on the drive back to Lagos, the car carrying him and his father was involved in a head-on collision, killing Arinze instantly and leaving Ejiofor hospitalised for a month with broken arms and wrists (and a small, permanent scar on his forehead). If this was some defining, galvanising event in Ejiofor’s life, he doesn’t say so; he’s far too measured to deal in epiphanies. However, he does allow that ’when tragedy strikes in a family, there’s a sort of unspoken contract you all enter into that you’ll pull together and do your best for everybody else.’

As to the lasting effect of the crash and the loss of his father - whom his mother says he was closest to and most resembled - he’s prudently oblique. ’I found some letters from my father the other day,’ he says ruminatively. ’It was really interesting; he wrote them when he was much younger than I am now, and I’d never seen him in the context of being a "young person" before. I guess it’s a relationship that still manages to surprise me with its complexity and flux, even though he’s been dead for 20 years.’

Despite her straitened circumstances, Obiajulu was determined to send her children to private schools, and Ejiofor found himself attending the prestigious Dulwich College.

’I was already devouring literature and I was the ripe old age of 15 when I decided to be an actor,’ he recalls. ’I just thought plays were the most fantastic way of expressing life. I thought I’d discovered Shakespeare - "hey, there’s a new guy in town, don’t know if anyone’s read him." I was just excited about the whole thing, from day one.’

Again, he doesn’t say so, but Ejiofor’s status as one of a handful of black boys at the school may have helped hone his chameleonic qualities; at any rate, his facility was quickly apparent as he played Angelo and Algernon in college productions of Measure for Measure and The Importance of Being Earnest. He joined the National Youth Theatre at 17, and, a couple of years later, was cast as an African translator in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (largely, ironically, on the strength of his first stab at Othello). Seemingly overnight, he’d become a ’Hollywood actor’.

’I couldn’t make head or tail of it at the time,’ he cheerfully admits. ’I mean, Spielberg? LA? It felt like my life had turbo-charged way beyond my aspirations. It showed me that any best-laid plans you try and make in this business are pretty useless.’

The fact that Ejiofor’s movie CV is now as copious as his theatre one is evidence of his transatlantic versatility; despite this, however, his mother has gone on record as saying she doesn’t see him as a ’Hollywood person’.Ejiofor laughs heartily, displaying his dazzling teeth, at this analysis.

’I wonder what she exactly means by that? If it means a red-carpet Paris Hilton type, then I’m glad she doesn’t see me in those terms. But I could see myself fitting into a certain LA lifestyle, on the understanding that it was finite. I mean, I love London, this is my home; I lived in New York for a couple of years and I could never really shake the feeling that I was on a kind of holiday from my life.’ He pauses for a beat. ’And you don’t really feel that in Camberwell.’

Perhaps Obiajulu had Ejiofor’s innate modesty in mind; this, after all, is the man who forgot to tell his mother that he’d won an Olivier award. ’This is going to sound completely absurd,’ he says, sipping his coffee, ’but I do sometimes feel like the enjoyment of an awards ceremony or the pride in the finished article hasn’t ever surpassed the joy of doing the work, of making it.’ He shrugs. ’The doing it is really the bit I’m there for.’

No wonder that Ejiofor continues to resist the ’Black British movie star’ accolade that some are still keen to thrust upon him. ’I don’t know what those terms mean,’ he says, seemingly genuinely bemused. ’I don’t know what constitutes a star as opposed to an actor; I guess other people decide those things.’

’Chiwetel is actually much more than a movie star,’ says Michael Grandage. ’That’s too restrictive a definition. He understands prep, rehearsal and the nature of performance. He’s too good to be labelled as simply this or that.’

He’s also shrewd enough to deflect deferentially questions of a too-personal nature: ’I think, in order for people to believe in your characters, they should know as little about you as possible,’ he grins.

His range certainly continues to be daunting: in the coming months he’ll be seen in Tonight at Noon, the latest quirk from New York indie director Michael Almereyda, and he’ll also star in David Mamet’s Redbelt as a martial arts instructor who’s forced back into competition fighting, a role involving an ’intense’ jujitsu training programme that he enjoyed immensely. ’I’d love to live in a world where every piece of food and every bit of exercise, every moment of the day, was designed to get the optimum performance out of my body - but I like ice cream too much.’

And in the meantime there’s Othello to be rescaled. ’I think plays, especially ones as complicated and epic as this, are what I find most challenging,’ he says, practically rubbing his hands with relish. ’It’s a great test, and a wonderful one. I guess that’s why you carry on.’

With that, Ejiofor bids a cordial farewell, and exits in as supernaturally calm a manner as he arrived. If he notices that every eye in the place has swivelled upon him as he does so, he gives no sign.

# ’Othello’ opens at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2, on 30 November.
# ’American Gangster’ is out on 16 November; ’Talk to Me’, 23 November