Chiwetel Ejiofor

The finest Othello in a generation, a scene-stealing villain in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster and now a brilliant portrayal of Thabo Mbeki - no wonder Chiwetel Ejiofor has the acting world at his mercy. Here, the south Londoner talks to Gaby Wood about his African roots and the end of apartheid

Chiwetel Ejiofor has spent the week in Long Island, pretending to be a counter-intelligence agent and chasing after Angelina Jolie. "She is very beautiful," he shrugs, "but you know, you get used to it." Last night, a Friday, he was out late with another of his co-stars, Liev Schreiber. So when I meet him in a New York café at one o’clock, he orders a delicate fruit salad and swears he’s only just had breakfast.

The film Ejiofor is shooting is Salt, Philip Noyce’s CIA conspiracy tale. His previous performances in thrillers Inside Man and American Gangster were so enviable they led Denzel Washington, who was also in both, to joke that he’d like to have him assassinated. And while Ejiofor has been game for all sorts of things - including comedies like Melinda and Melinda and Kinky Boots, and a sci-fi blockbuster called 2012 which is due out later this year - there is one thing he is truly exceptional at: a quiet, complicated heroism that’s as mesmeric on stage as it is on screen. It’s a quality that makes the 34-year-old one of the best British actors of his generation.

In life, Ejiofor is self-effacing, almost to the point of disappearing: interested in what makes others tick, constantly declaring himself to be dull, not terribly given to introspection. He laughs easily - a pleasant, rippling chuckle - is always amiable, but never flashy. I’ve met him on a couple of occasions with friends, and it’s striking how he can be the best-looking, best-known person in a room and still behave like he’s part of someone else’s entourage.

Though he had a small part in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad at the age of 19, it wasn’t until Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things five years later that Ejiofor’s gifts became widely known. In that film he plays Okwe, a Nigerian immigrant in London who trained as a doctor in his home country but now makes ends meet illegally, driving a cab in the daytime and working as a hotel clerk at night. As his face fills the screen, Ejiofor makes the story all about invisibility - Okwe is both larger than life and, in his social context, entirely veiled; his being unseen is a wonderful dramatic conceit and a devastating political truth. As Ejiofor says now: "Okwe is the most classic hero character because he has superpowers, you know, in the context of the world that he’s in - he’s a doctor. And so like any good superhero, he has to hide his gifts."

If Ejiofor’s skill is to reveal the characters he plays obliquely - to come at them ungrandly, from underneath - then his rendition of the then future South African President Thabo Mbeki in the new Channel 4 drama Endgame might be seen as the latest in this distinguished line. A gripping, fact-based film directed by Pete Travis and written by Paula Milne, Endgame is structured around covert negotiations conducted in England over the end of apartheid. That a series of talks should be dramatic enough in itself to drive a plot is testament to the quality of the writing and to the extraordinary performances. Ejiofor’s Mbeki is a peaceful, intelligent-eyed, hopeful man who loses his calm only once, in a rugged, touching scene.

"One of the most striking things about Thabo, I think, is for him to be in those circumstances and not be completely cynical, and not be particularly paranoid," Ejiofor says, sipping a camomile tea. "And to know that there’s a reasonable negotiated end in sight, even though everything would point to that not being possible. They were full of... not a destructive fervour, but a really optimistic, progressive belief, which is amazing."

This was the second time Ejiofor had been to South Africa. It took him a while to get over the first, a trip he made in 2004 to shoot the film version of Gillian Slovo’s book Red Dust. In that, he played a torture victim, and was, as he now says, "slightly traumatised". He explains: "I just wasn’t expecting... I don’t know, it was crazy not to have been expecting to come across a really complicated racial situation." He laughs a little. "I was naïve. I just thought I’d bowl in and it would be like Camberwell. And, you know, it’s not. There were people in our crew who had burned down villages in Zimbabwe, for example. You know, if you have a torture scene and somebody in the room says: ’Yeah, that’s exactly how you do it’, it’s a complicated set," he says, his eyebrows emphasising the understatement. "It was a lot to take on. But it was the first film experience that I’ve had where I’d come into contact with something I was aware was going to be a very affecting part of my life."

It was not the Africa he’d known until then. Ejiofor’s parents, who met as teenagers near the city of Enugu in south-eastern Nigeria, fled to London during the Biafran war in the late 60s. His father, like Okwe in Dirty Pretty Things, was a doctor; unlike Okwe, he was also a pop star, and performed his own songs with Ejiofor’s mother. In England, he retrained so that he could work as a doctor, and completed a PhD in biochemistry. Ejiofor’s mother found work as a pharmacist, and gave birth to four children: Chiwetel, his older brother, and two much younger sisters. They went back to Nigeria often, to visit grandparents and various other family members, and Ejiofor, who went as recently as last year, still thinks of it fondly.

He was born in east London, so close to Upton Park that, as he puts it, "you could hear the West Ham roar from the house". That was, inevitably, the football team he supported until he was six or seven, when, in a bid to blend in after they moved to West Norwood, he switched to Crystal Palace. Ejiofor is amiably defensive about this early act of chameleonism: "I think at that age - I mean, some people disagree - you can just about change. My brother never did - he supports West Ham to this day. But he was nine when we moved, so I figure, nine, you’ve got to stick with West Ham, ’cos now it’s part of your whole persona."

Ejiofor went to school at Dulwich College, and joined the National Youth Theatre. He loved "the alchemy of acting", and watching people like Marlon Brando and Al Pacino and Robert Duvall (can you guess that his favourite film is The Godfather?) he was "amazed that people weren’t actually going through any of this". At the National Youth Theatre, he found himself playing Othello as a teenager. "It’s quite weird doing it when you’re young," he says now, "because you have to tap into all these emotions yet you have no idea what they’re about. You have to connect to something that’s much older than you, so it’s quite interesting - you have a rounder understanding of things." When he returned to the play last year, he felt that it was already "somehow a part of me". Occasionally, he has felt "chemically changed" as a result of a role, and this was one of them.

He played Othello in Michael Grandage’s production at the Donmar Warehouse in 2007 and he was hailed by Susannah Clapp in this paper as "the best Othello for generations", an actor who was destined to "transform the history of the play". In the New Yorker, John Lahr described him as bringing to the character "a natural nobility and a decency that are a kind of poetic revelation"; Ejiofor, Lahr wrote, "gives as eloquent a shape to heartbreak as to love".

"I always thought of the play as a sequel to Romeo and Juliet," Ejiofor says of Othello. "I think Shakespeare’s so astute in his understanding of people being vulnerable, you know. And that love is so easy to corrupt. I think so many of Shakespeare’s plays are about how fragile love is - how perfect and beautiful it is, but also how terrifying and easy to manipulate it is."

He saw some of that even as a boy, a self-confessed romantic "in all the senses of it", in love with a passionate view of life. Reflecting back, Ejiofor mutters words like "warriors", "Greek", "renaissance", then quickly undercuts himself: "Of course, I had to give up on that! Now, you know, it’s coffee and the morning paper." He still considers himself a romantic, "but it’s sort of complicated - like anything else, it gets more and more difficult". (Needless to say, he won’t divulge anything about his love life, or how he can sustain one at all when he lives on two continents at once: "The first way to sustain it is not to talk about it!" he smiles.)

For reasons we’ll come to in a moment, Ejiofor’s mother found herself alone with four kids, and in response to a question about how she managed, Ejiofor says: "I don’t know. The older I get, I think: I don’t think I could handle all that right now, I mean, I have enough trouble paying the gas bill. Trying to fix the toaster is hard enough. But it’s a lot of different factors. And also, how do you really know what you’ll do until you’re faced with those situations?"

"What’s the hardest thing you’ve had to do?" I ask.

"I don’t know," he says, "it’s incomparable really. Just work stuff."

"Is that really the hardest thing?"

"Yeah. I don’t think I’ve had personal crises I’ve had to juggle with. So, unfortunately, it’s just sort of trying to get work right."

"Why is that unfortunate?" I wonder. "Do you think you need it as an actor?"

Ejiofor laughs. "No. But maybe as a person it could have been quite interesting... just for the sake of the interview!"

There is a scar on Ejiofor’s forehead. The story it tells is of a car crash in Nigeria: Ejiofor was 11, four other people were in the car, and Ejiofor only knew one of them - his father. Everyone except Ejiofor and the stranger sitting next to him were killed. His father was 39.

Last year, Ejiofor directed his first film, a 20-minute short called Slapper. Starring Iain Glen and Bill Nighy, it’s an intense, evocative piece about a young boy who develops a fantasy after his father dies: that his father returns a hero, the champion of an invented absurdist sport which is like a cross between rock paper scissors and lucha libre.

Ejiofor says he and a friend came up with the idea years ago. "Young adults have an amazing need for heroes," he suggests, "and even if there are no heroes [they have] an ability to create heroes out of nothing. I was certainly like that when I was young."

"Was your dad a hero?" I ask.

"Yeah. I mean, to me, yeah. You know, I was young when my father passed, so I was definitely able to sustain a perception of my father - which to a large degree, from what I understand, is completely accurate - but I feel like I’ve always had a relationship with him. It’s a long time to sustain a relationship with someone who’s not there, but, at the same time, it is a relationship, like any other - growing, changing."

Now he thinks of his father not as he did when he was a boy, but as someone who is in some sense overtaking him. "My father died when he was very young," Ejiofor goes on, "and as I approach the age that he was... not that one would ever become the older man, but... you’re aware that it’s likely, unless something happens, that I will be older than he ever was. It’s going to be interesting as it comes around - what all those things mean." He pauses, briefly. "It’s a constantly fascinating relationship that I have with my father," he says.

For a while, Ejiofor tried to live in New York - he rented an apartment around the corner from the café where we meet - but he found the city claustrophobic in a way he doesn’t find London (where he has a flat near Regent’s Park), and certainly doesn’t find LA. He likes Los Angeles, likes the unhectic pace, the winding roads up to the Hollywood Hills, the weather. He has a place there even though he doesn’t really need to for work, a move he concedes is fairly unfashionable. "I think for a little while I maybe wanted to loathe it, but actually it turned out that I was just lying to myself, and I was having quite a good time!" he laughs. "You know, you’re there thinking: ’Where’s the fire? What exactly is the problem here? Oh yeah, it’s too nice.

I’m going soft.’"

Still, it’s not as if he spends much time in any one place; Ejiofor works non-stop. He says he hasn’t had a proper holiday for about seven years, and adds, with slightly unconvincing assertiveness, that this summer is "the one: this is the year of the relaxing beach holiday".

He could see himself living in a cabin in the woods one day, though he says he wouldn’t need to be alone: "I could definitely hang with a few people." His interest in others is part of what led him to acting. "I’ve always found people really interesting," he says. "I’m not someone who doesn’t really get other people - doesn’t really understand what they’re for, and why there are so many of them!" He chuckles. "I’ve always kind of enjoyed it."

One of the things he’s gleaned from his empathetic studies is that, contrary to thespian myth, human beings transform themselves very little. "I think there’s an obsession with arc," he says, "the arc of a character, the character’s journey - but I don’t think people change all that much in the end. I think people have a very primal, immediate nature, and they spend most of their time struggling against it or trying to reconnect with it."

He must know I’m going to ask him what his own unchanging nature is, but it seems that of all the characters he’s studied, Chiwetel Ejiofor is one that has so far slipped his grasp. "It’s an interesting question," he says. "What do I struggle with more than anything? Actually, really trying to connect to my life is always a struggle, because a lot of my life is based on perceptions of what other people are doing. I don’t self-reflect that much. I guess as an actor you’re constantly put into situations where you delve into other psychologies. For that reason it becomes easier not to really deal with your own." He smiles. "Which is why I should probably go on holiday more."

• Endgame is on Channel 4 on 4 May