If the world was collapsing tomorrow, the land was sinking into the sea and if the fate of 6.79 billion people was hanging in the balance, who would you want in charge? Well, according to the makers of 2012, a new mega-budget disaster movie, we’d all turn to Chiwetel Ejiofor. For the 35-year-old East London-born actor plays the movie’s brain-box hero and White House scientific advisor Adrian Helmsley — the only man who can provide explanations, who is aware of the solution, who can stare at a piece of graph paper and say, straight-faced: “For the first time ever the neutrinos are causing a physical reaction.”
It’s a smart casting choice by the film’s director Roland Emmerich, master of the “if-it-ain’t-broke-demolish-it” school of disaster movies (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow). For Ejiofor possesses an uncanny ability to be the still centre of a turning, churning Earth. With great big Bambi-brown eyes and a sad, soulful face, he is a master of the quiet close-up.
In Dirty Pretty Things, for instance, he played a Nigerian immigrant who was trapped and exploited in a hellish London netherworld, but who held himself with a captivating dignity. In American Gangster he was the soothing, smiling brother of Denzel Washington’s firecracker mob boss. In Inside Man, again opposite Washington, he was the wise straight-man detective tempering the risky excesses of his partner. Recently, when reflecting on Ejiofor’s stage turn as Othello, the New Yorker critic John Lahr remarked that he displayed “a natural nobility and a decency that are a kind of poetic revelation”. In London his performance won him a Best Actor Olivier Award for what was described as “one of the most memorable performances of Othello in recent years”.
Thus, as Emmerich and 2012 splurge the movie’s alleged £160 million budget on the lavishly realised destruction of the planet (including some eerie 9/11 style mayhem featuring businessmen falling from toppling towers), it makes for satisfying movie logic that Ejiofor should provide the film with both a moral compass and a solid emotional core. Though Danny Glover plays an Obama-style US President, it is Ejiofor’s preternaturally calm and utterly noble Helmsley who fuels the decisions.
“I’m not a noble dude,” says Ejiofor today, with a grimace and a giggle, instantly rubbishing the entire thesis while sipping spring water in a swish Central London hotel suite. The actor is weary of seeing a through-line of decency and nobility in his work and instead scrambles for alternative theories. “Helmsley is morally conflicted anyway!” he continues. “He is torn by the responsibilities he has to everybody else and is not the moral centre of the movie.”
He is, however, happy to be drawn on the movie’s invocation of 9/11 and claims: “The nature of an apocalyptic film is that you get to see the worse things imaginable, as well as heroism and triumph. It’s different if the film was actually trying to draw parallels with 9/11. Yes, it allows for that connection, but it’s not deliberate.”
Ejiofor says all this with a half-smile of equanimity. He has announced that he has “nothing to hide from anybody, and I will answer questions honestly about everything”. But this is only partially true. He seems to be fearful of revelation, as if a word coming directly from his heart might destroy the illusion of the man in control.
On race, for example, he is positively allergic. His friends and colleagues repeatedly claim that he would rather be just a “great actor” than a “great black actor”. I have read nearly a decade’s worth of interview transcripts and never seen him use the word “black”. When, in 2002, he was cast, controversially for some, as Francesca Annis’s young son Nicky in the Donmar Warehouse’s production of Noël Coward’s The Vortex, he dodged all issues of ethnicity with: “I’m only interested in the acting.” At the time, by the way, the Vortex director Michael Grandage noted: “Chiwetel has a nobility and, in life as well as on stage, a stillness that is vital.” There it is again.
So naturally he is equally precise with his language on the racial aspects of 2012. I remark that in the 1998 disaster movie Deep Impact the casting of Morgan Freeman as a black American President was seen as stunt casting, whereas now the casting of Glover as President and Ejiofor as a White House top honcho is unexceptional. A sign of the times? “I think in Hollywood there is a history of casting choices that people find surprising,” he says, like a politician on Question Time. “But obviously the nature of the election and Barack Obama has normalised, er, all that.”
Similarly, he describes his entire career as a process of luck, seemingly ungoverned by his own actions. He grew up in Forest Gate in East London, one of three children born to Nigerian parents who had fled the civil war of the late 1960s. He became interested in acting after starring in Measure for Measure at school (Dulwich College) and then went from play to play, from the National Youth Theatre to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts to an award-winning (“most promising newcomer”) role in Roger Michel’s production of Blue/Orange at the National Theatre in 2000. His first big movie role was playing an African translator in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997). “And before you know it, you book a couple of more jobs, and now you’re really working!” he says. Now he is currently a Hollywood hot commodity, who lives in LA, counts Denzel Washington as a colleague and fan and regularly socialises with the likes of Warren Beatty and Sydney Poitier. “When you come into contact with iconic figures like that,” he says, “there’s few people left that can excite you.”
There is, of course, another side to Ejiofor, and possibly even a reason for his reticence. When he was 11 years old, while on a family wedding trip to Nigeria, the car carrying him and his father was involved in a head-on collision. His father was killed instantly and Ejiofor was in hospital for ten weeks, suffering from broken arms and wrists, and head trauma. The latter has left him with a prominent scar on his forehead that is as distinguishing a trademark today as his soft eyes and deep dulcet tones.
The crash, and his father’s death, are as personal as it gets. “I used to have this fantasy,” he begins, slowly, “that I could retain a lot of what is private and painful to me. And I certainly didn’t want every interview turning into a confessional with me weeping in the corner at the end of it. I didn’t want it to become a public thing, but it also seemed too much of an effort to attempt to hide it. And now, it’s not the elephant in the room, it’s just a personal tragedy.”
The thaw begins and he subsequently suggests that, as a teenager growing up in London with a widowed mother, what he loved about acting was the possibility for expression. “It was a way of expressing these big epic emotions,” he says. “There was potential to go on these crazy journeys of love and betrayal, all these huge emotions that I connected to.”
His language is still precise, but the implication is that acting allowed a release of inner turmoil. Tellingly, he adds: “You can end up holding your emotions for the screen and the stage, while in life you find yourself less capable of demonstrating how you feel in a broad way.” He pauses for a second, and qualifies carefully: “Some actors experience that. I don’t necessarily mean me.” Naturally.
Easing into his stride now, leaping from subject to subject, he says that his progression from London to Hollywood was inevitable. “You can’t afford to do films from only one country,” he says, chuckling at the idea. “ ‘Spielberg? Shove it! If it’s not in East London, I’m not interested!’ ”
He jokes too that in Hollywood he trades on his status as a heavyweight English stage actor and that Washington “moved heaven and earth to get me into American Gangster”. He says that he’s excited about the forthcoming Salt, in which he plays a CIA agent and Angelina Jolie a possible Russian defector. And he is also developing a directorial debut, “but I don’t want it all over the papers just yet”.
He finds LA “provincial and easygoing”, sails a lot and, he says, wakes up every morning, stands by his pool and shouts: “Yeaaaahhh, I’ve made it!” On his long-term relationship with the actress Radha Mitchell (they met on the set of Woody Allen’s 2004 film Melinda and Melinda) he is typically unforthcoming. “No!” he says, and laughs at the idea that he would contemplate discussing it. “You can put whatever you like about that, but no!”
He finishes as he began — humble, bashful, polite — and yet just that tiny bit less impenetrable. “It’s been a great wild adventure, but I never planned it,” he says. “Even to this day.” So what is the secret? He gives a shrug and sighs: “I just keep turning up.”
2012 is released on Nov 13
Your Comments
Order By: