'I didn't have an equal shot at things': Chiwetel Ejiofor on racism, privilege and why he became an actor
Racism Film Telegraph Magazine Culture Standard
Gaby Wood
I first interviewed Chiwetel Ejiofor 10 years ago.
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The Telegraph
I first interviewed Chiwetel Ejiofor 10 years ago. I mention this because I’ve been trying, since we met again, to identify the exact difference in his demeanour. It’s small – the way you might notice someone shifting in their seat; a slight alteration in his comfort or confidence. But it’s a difference that tells a story of success.

Back then, he was just entering his 30s. He’d been in some excellent movies, played an era-defining Othello at the Donmar Warehouse, directed a wonderfully strange short film, and been awarded an OBE. But he hadn’t yet starred in 12 Years a Slave or been nominated for an Oscar. He hadn’t gone straight from that into a challenging production at the National Theatre or delved into the story of the Nigerian Civil War (which led his parents to flee to Britain) in Half of a Yellow Sun. He hadn’t directed a feature film and he hadn’t yet reached the age – 39 – at which his father had died suddenly. These past 10 years have led Ejiofor to bear his cultural heft with a discreet sort of grace. After all he must know, when we sit down for tea in London’s Soho, that everyone around us is looking at him. He is dressed all in dark blue – linen trousers, crew-neck jumper – and has set beside him the sleek navy coat that he brought slung over one arm. He is nothing if not composed.

And somehow, before anyone has even taken our order, we are harking back to the #OscarsSoWhite furore of 2015. ‘I think Oscars So White and everything in that era was very important,’ Ejiofor, now 41, says amiably, ‘because it really wasn’t talking about representation at the Oscars – even though that was the front page. It was about the films that are getting made, so that people can then be at the Oscars. And so, immediately, it’s about systemic change.’

He feels that the industry has responded in a combination of ways. ‘You know,’ he explains, ‘the received information was always that films can’t make a lot of money if they have black leads, and that’s simply not true. I think everyone has always known that it was a cover – not even a particularly covert cover – for a racialised agenda. What Oscars So White did was break down the capacity to hide behind those kinds of falsehoods.’

A year earlier, in 2014, 12 Years a Slave – which was more or less built on Ejiofor’s subtle performance as Solomon Northup, a free man kidnapped and sold into slavery – had won the Academy Award for best picture. Lupita Nyong’o had won best supporting actress for her role in the film, and virtually everyone else involved, including Ejiofor, had been nominated. Ejiofor points out that it made almost $200 million worldwide. And in that respect, he argues, 12 Years a Slave paved the way for last year’s Black Panther, the only Marvel superhero film with a predominantly black cast. Although in genre terms the two films couldn’t be more different, there were no longer any unspoken racial reasons to block the latter – which has, of course, been a gigantic hit.

Ejiofor’s feature directorial debut, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, raises these issues simply by having been made. On the one hand, it’s the true and elating story of a boy in Malawi who saves his community from famine by building a wind turbine. Shot on an epic scale yet with a dramatic immediacy that makes it feel like it’s happening on your doorstep, it’s a film that’s easy to love.

On the other hand, it is, for a Hollywood star, an act of fearlessness. Ejiofor adapted the memoir of William Kamkwamba, on which it’s based, and as well as directing, he stars as the boy’s father, Trywell. A large part of the dialogue is spoken in Chichewa, the local language, which Ejiofor and much of the rest of the cast had to learn from scratch. He put together an ingeniously international set of collaborators – Brazilian production designer, British cinematographer, Italian editor and so on. There had never been a film made on this scale in Malawi – a lot of the equipment had to be borrowed from South Africa – and the extraordinary young lead, Maxwell Simba, a 15-year-old boy from Nairobi, had never acted before.

All of which makes you realise that the current conversation about diversity in the film industry is important, but not nearly nuanced enough. It shouldn’t just be about the simplest form of representation – how many colours of skin can you see on a screen? – but about a multiplicity of perspectives. Ejiofor talks about the different stories that can now be told; The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is genuinely a tale that couldn’t have been hatched in Hollywood. But now, distributed by Netflix, it will be seen all over the world.

Ejiofor grew up in London, the second of four siblings born to a Nigerian couple. His parents were pop stars (Arinze, his father, was a well-known musician in Nigeria; Obiajulu, his mother, was Arinze’s backing singer) who were also medics – Arinze retrained as a doctor under the British system and Obiajulu became a pharmacist. When Ejiofor was 11, he travelled with his father to Nigeria. On that trip, Arinze was killed in a car crash. Ejiofor was also involved in the accident and remained in a coma for several weeks. He was left with a scar on his forehead, which gives him a kind of mythical origin story along the lines of Harry Potter. He is, according to his mother, the most like his father of the four children. ‘I feel like I’ve always had a relationship with him,’ Ejiofor told me. ‘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.’

Soon after the tragedy Ejiofor threw himself into acting, later joining the National Youth Theatre. After he was nominated for an Oscar, one of his sisters, the CNN news anchor Zain Asher, broke down on air, recalling tearfully that a young Ejiofor would write lines of Shakespeare on his bedroom walls and spend his spare time rehearsing Measure for Measure. After Dulwich College he went to drama school, where he was spotted by Steven Spielberg, who cast him in a small role in the 1997 slavery epic Amistad.

As a teenager, and at drama school, he was consistently told ‘it’s going to be quite difficult for you to make any money as an actor’, unless he changed his name. The one he had, it was suggested, meant he’d have to spend his entire career playing Africans. And Ejiofor’s response, in the form of many parts, has been to say: ‘Like that’s a bad thing?’

His breakthrough role came when he was 24: as Okwe, a Nigerian illegal-immigrant doctor, opposite Audrey Tautou in Stephen Frears’s 2002 thriller Dirty Pretty Things, a masterclass in taut restraint. Since then, he has entered film history in virtually every way – as a dramatic icon (in everything from Children of Men to 12 Years), a romcom hero (Love Actually), and a Marvel supervillain (Doctor Strange).

In 2012 he made two films that were unnervingly connected. First he shot Half of a Yellow Sun (alongside Thandie Newton), based on the novel by feminist author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a family friend. ‘We’re from the same area of Nigeria,’ he explains, ‘and we’re Igbo – which is why both of our names begin with “Chi” [which means God]. So I was aware of her in a different way from her being an author.’ When he read her account of the Biafran War, it chimed so much with the stories he’d heard from his grandfather that it brought tears to Ejiofor’s eyes. After he’d made the film, he went straight from Calabar in Nigeria, where he visited the Slave History Museum, to start pre-production on 12 Years a Slave in Louisiana, in the American South. He realised that he was following the terrible trajectory of hundreds of thousands of Igbo people sold into slavery. ‘I know my father would be really interested in the kinds of topics I’m working on now,’ he said then, ‘this kind of politics and the conversations around it. Perhaps proud.’

This summer his voice will be heard as the villainous Scar in The Lion King, a photorealistic CGI remake of the Disney cartoon (also starring Beyoncé and Donald Glover), which Ejiofor thinks is going to be ‘mind-blowing – I’m as excited as anyone else’.

Recently, having spent years in LA, he moved back to London with his girlfriend, the Ghanaian-Australian model Frances Aaternir, though they’ve kept a place in LA and still spend a certain amount of time there.

Because Ejiofor is fairly protective of his personal life – arguing, if the question ever comes up, that the more people know of him, the less they will believe in the characters he portrays – he can sometimes be characterised as closed. But if you look back at what he’s said, you realise that was never the case. Ejiofor is private, but he’s not cautious. He has always said what he thinks.

Which is how, when we meet, the conversation quickly expands into a look at unconscious racial bias in Western society. The moment when ‘any sort of meaningful equality can happen’, Ejiofor says, ‘is when people actually choose to hire somebody who doesn’t look like them’. Most of the offices in London, he elaborates, ‘are very white offices. I mean, we can have a gender wage gap conversation that’s very serious and meaningful. But you almost can’t have a meaningful conversation about the racial gap, because there are so few people who are ever in the space. It’s so incredibly rare that it’s statistically insignificant.’

He gives an example of the alternative. Imagine – he offers these names as hypothetical characters – Chiwetel, John and David apply for the same job at a tech company. ‘Let’s say you’re roughly the same,’ he suggests, in terms of qualifications. ‘Do you have the same opportunity when you walk into that job interview? And of course – right? – the answer is absolutely not.’ This is so obvious it makes Ejiofor laugh. ‘Like, it’s ludicrously not. And if we want to pretend that we have any kind of equality in this society, then we do have to address those things.’

Ejiofor says that this sort of unconscious racism is part of the reason he chose to go into acting. ‘I knew, when I was 16, that I didn’t have an equal shot at certain things. Even though we were all within a dynamic of privilege, because I was in a private school,’ he reflects. ‘I had to make choices – which worked out for me – about not really putting myself into the jobs market in that way. Those were decisions that I made young, because’ – he laughs gently – ‘I wasn’t anybody’s nephew.’ Were those two things really linked so early on, I ask – the desire to act and the sidestepping of a racially biased system?

‘A hundred per cent,’ he replies. ‘Because it was just clear that the dynamics weren’t built for me. I always felt that acting was a great thing because it offered me the opportunity to think outside the box,’ he goes on. But ‘obviously you realise looking back that it’s very fortunate to get those opportunities as a young man. It’s not really a way to run an entire system, you know, because it’s desperately unfair to all of the people who didn’t get those exact breaks that I got.’

Ejiofor is constructive in all of his thinking about bias. He says, for instance, that the MeToo movement has been ‘extremely educational’ for him because he grew up in the Thatcher era, so in his own mind ‘there was no psychological disconnect between power and femininity’; and that some of the attitudes towards women that have been accepted in his industry are ‘morally bankrupt’.

In preparing for The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, the process by which Ejiofor hired his heads of department seems almost zanily unexpected. He wanted the film to have the authenticity of City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s 2002 film about children growing up in a favela in Brazil. So he hired Tulé Peak, the production designer from City of God, and its costume designer, Bia Salgado. (Neither had worked anywhere in Africa before.)

Then he wanted the film to look like those impressionist paintings in which rural farmers are given ‘a very determined sense of equality’, so he hired Dick Pope, the British cinematographer who’d shot Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner, with its sweeping impressionistic landscapes. His editor, Valerio Bonelli, cut the Oscar-nominated Darkest Hour. And together this team – partly self-selecting, he says, because only a certain kind of person would be up for the challenge – allowed him the freedom to direct himself, in a foreign language, without feeling he was ‘completely underwater’.

In his democratic outlook, you sense Ejiofor enacted a corrective to something he’d once pointed out to a fellow director. ‘We use military terms, don’t we? We “shoot”,’ he said. ‘And the way that works when you’re in a foreign country, when you’re thinking about a British cast and crew, is that people tend to sort of channel their inner colonialist. Like, “How would my great-grandfather have ruled these masses?” It’s ridiculous.’

A few days later I speak to Ejiofor again. He calls from Sundance Film Festival, where he is about to accept a prize. The film has been very warmly received, and has sparked conversations comparing it to Roma (also distributed by Netflix, and given enough cinematic exposure to qualify for big awards).

The relationship between Simba’s character, William, and Ejiofor’s Trywell is central to the film, and I wonder about Ejiofor’s memories of his own father, and how they have evolved as he’s got older. ‘It has always been a part of my work, and something that I do think about a lot,’ he says, ‘but it wasn’t something that I’d thought about in connection with this – even though there is such a strong father-and-son element to the story.’

From now on, Ejiofor feels it will be important to balance his work as a director and as an actor – including going back to the stage, which he says is definitely in the offing, but too early to announce. ‘Film projects take a long time, so I would still be doing other things in between. And I feel nurtured by doing other things.’ His aim is to keep ‘an open mind to what is happening and to the world; to be a brief chronicle of the times’.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is in selected cinemas from Friday and on Netflix from 1 March