With the government announcing last week that it will seek 20 successful black
role models to prove colour is no bar to success in modern Britain, it is
hard to imagine anyone better to play the part than Chiwetel Ejiofor.
The star of Othello now running at London’s trendy Donmar Warehouse theatre
can do no wrong in the eyes of most theatre critics, directors and public.
Not only can he do Shakespeare – in the great if stereotypical role for
black actors – he has also convinced as a transvestite prostitute, a
drug-soaked upper-class English twit, an asylum inmate and a ruthless
manhunter in a sci-fi epic. As role models go, “Chewie”, as friends call
him, is the Lewis Hamilton of stage and screen.
While much of the fuss in the run-up to the current production was centred on
long-standing Hollywood star Ewan McGregor’s return to theatre in the role
of Iago, it is Ejiofor’s performance that the critics have fallen for.
Our own Christopher Hart found him “convincing”, The Evening Standard’s
Nicholas de Jongh described him as “simply extraordinary” and even The Daily
Telegraph’s Charles Spencer, who said he would be “reluctant to part with a
tenner for [McGregor’s] performance”, praised Ejiofor’s “beautifully spoken,
massively dignified Othello”.
It is almost remarkable that still only 33 years old, Ejiofor deigns to tread
the boards of London’s theatreland, given the warmth with which Hollywood
has embraced him. If their careers continue on current trajectories it may
be Ejiofor rather than McGregor who is remembered as having had the bigger
British impact on Tinseltown.
There are not many English actors who can say they were given their first
movie role by Steven Spielberg and have also been cast by Ridley Scott,
Spike Lee and Woody Allen.
Leading the praise is his current director at the Donmar, Michael Grandage: “I
can’t find a bad thing to say about him,” he enthuses. Grandage admits he
first thought of putting Ejiofor into the role five years ago when directing
him as Nicky Lancaster, the spoilt upper-class drug addict in Noël Coward’s
The Vortex, also at The Donmar.
He considers Ejiofor to be someone to “build a production around” and spent
three years waiting for him, McGregor and Kelly Reilly, who plays Desdemona,
to be available at the same time. “Chiwetel has a nobility and in life as
well as on stage a stillness and openness about him,” says Grandage. “He can
plummet to tragic depths like no one else I have worked with.”
He has already proved amply that he can do lighter parts as well, having
played Keira Knightley’s husband in Richard Curtis’s featherweight comedy
Love Actually. “I like to disappear into a role,” he says. “I equate the
success of it with a feeling of being chemically changed.”
He prefers not to be typecast in any role, let alone one traditionally seen as
a vehicle for black actors. Yet it was in an earlier incarnation as Othello,
in a production for the National Youth Theatre at the age of 19, that one of
Spielberg’s scouts saw him, leading to his role as the African interpreter
in the 1997 film Amistad, a career development Ejiofor describes as “pretty
terrifying” at the time.
Until then, although determined to make it as an actor, he had envisaged a
slow-burn rise that probably involved playing a footsoldier before getting
his first main part: “I remember getting cast in Amistad and getting this
very strong feeling that I had overshot myself. It was a great shock. It
made me realise that this is not a profession you can predict; that you can
have all these ambitions and expectations and that they can all be thrown to
the wind. What was peculiar about that situation was that my aspirations
were so far below what actually happened.”
He undoubtedly inherited a performing gene. His father Arinze was a doctor,
but in his youth had been moderately successful as a singer and guitarist in
Nigeria, before fleeing to London with his wife Obiajulu to escape the
Biafran war.
Chiwetel was born and brought up in London’s Forest Gate, the middle child of
three. Tragedy intervened when he was 11, on a trip to Nigeria for a family
wedding, when a taxi collided with the car in which he, his father and three
friends were travelling. His father and two of the men were killed
instantly; young Chiwetel was flung clear, but still broke both arms and
received a head injury from which he retains a scar.
He believes in the school of acting which says the less the audience know
about the actor’s private life, the easier it is for him to make them
believe in the role. That is one excuse for a reticence to publicise his
romance with Australian movie star Radha Mitchell whom he met while working
on Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda, in which she starred. When the family
returned from Nigeria after the tragedy his mother did everything to make
sure the children got the best education, sending Chiwetel to Dulwich
college, where he profited from excellent drama teaching.
Contemporaries remember being impressed by him even then. “He was born to act
like no one else I know,” recalled one. Perhaps inevitably, he played
Othello twice as a teenager with the National Youth Theatre but feels that
at the time he didn’t do it justice because he had not yet experienced
“memorable jealousy”. He clearly has since.
It was the millennium year that saw Ejiofor’s big breakthrough when Roger
Michell cast him as Christopher, the schizophrenic teenager in Joe Penhall’s
Blue/Orange, a play that tackled the difficult issues of madness, race and
the perception of others. Ejiofor excelled to win a clutch of awards for
best newcomer as well as the Olivier award for best supporting actor.
That led to a return to the big screen in Stephen Frears’s 2002 Dirty Pretty
Things about illegal immigrants in London. Ejiofor played a Nigerian-born
cabbie, drawing on his memories of his father to flesh out his character.
Fans of the film included Woody Allen who immediately cast him as a jazz
pianist in Melinda and Melinda, which led to a two-year stay in New York.
The work offers came so thick and fast he might have been lost to America for
good. Spike Lee put him in She Hate Me and Inside Man, but luckily
British-based cinema clawed him back for the improbable role of the
transvestite Lola in Kinky Boots and the apocalyptic Children of Men.
He is currently out there on the big screen in Ridley Scott’s American
Gangster alongside Denzel Washington who subsequently said Ejiofor was so
good he’d “like to assassinate him”.
In Redbelt, due for release early next year, he plays a martial arts
instructor drawn into prize fighting, a role for which he had to do
substantial rehearsal in the gym.
He has already been cast in Three Way Split, a story of three men searching
for a lost friend in Croatia, and Toussaint, due in 2009, about the
18th-century slave rebellion in Haiti. He was one of 2007’s invitees to join
Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the body that
awards the Oscars.
But there is an element in Ejiofor’s soul that is unfailingly, irredeemably
British. He lives in Camberwell and likes a few beers at the weekend, which
caused a few embarrassing moments while playing Lola which required shaved
eyebrows and stuck-on nails.
“Walking into the local boozer on a Friday night was an intriguing
experience,” he recalls.
He is also a keen football supporter. When Arsenal star Thierry Henry gave his
pal Spike Lee a couple of VIP tickets for a game, the director took Ejiofor.
For the Briton the big moment came afterwards in the trophy room where he
got to lift the FA Cup, a moment he is unlikely to see savoured by his own
team, Crystal Palace.
On his own pitch, however, right now one thing is certain: Chewie Ejiofor is a
winner.
