loading...
Canwest News Service
JACKSON HOLE, Wyoming – If you're starring in one of the biggest disaster movies of the decade, you naturally want to talk about the explosions and the special effects and those scenes where famous landmarks crumble to dust.
Well, don't you? After all, isn't this what the movie is all about?
Well, not necessarily. Not if your name is Chiwetel Ejiofor.
The 33-year-old Londoner has received some glowing reviews for his portrayal in 2012 as a young American scientist who becomes a White House insider after he discovers that changes to the earth's crust, core and atmosphere will trigger a global calamity. But the praise has little to do with the planetary mayhem director Roland Emmerich serves up. It's because of the integrity of his performance; his character, White House adviser Adrian Helmsley, gives the story its moral compass.
So if you ask Ejiofor what made him sign up for 2012 – the story or the role – he doesn't miss a beat in answering.
"I really liked the character, and I thought he was fascinating. I hadn't seen someone like that before. I just hadn't been exposed to anybody like that, and I thought it was a really interesting part to play – particularly in this kind of movie."
Ejiofor was intrigued by the opportunity to portray a fully developed human being in what, on the surface, may seem no more than a mega-budget disaster movie. And that brings him to the second half of the equation: Roland Emmerich, a filmmaker determined to bring a human dimension to the film.
"I was very attracted to making a film with Roland Emmerich, who I think is really extraordinary. I think he has this amazing passion for bringing a unique cinematic experience to an audience, and I feel he's completely energized and excited by that. But he's also somebody who really believes in driving stories through emotion and character."
Ejiofor reveals an inquiring mind and concern for artistic excellence – qualities that have made him one of Britain's most admired young actors, both on stage and screen. He doesn't compromise, not even when it comes to marketing himself. He could have given himself a more manageable stage name, but he didn't. In the billing for 2012, Chiwetel Ejiofor is right up there with John Cusack and Amanda Peet. For the record, it's pronounced "chew-it-tell edge-oh- for" but his friends call him Chewy.
He was born in South London to Nigerian immigrant parents and studied at Dulwich College and the prestigious London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. At 19, he won a small film role in Steven Spielberg's Amistad, but his first love has always been the stage.
His terrifying performance as a tormented young schizophrenic in Blue/Orange at Britain's National Theatre landed him the 2000 London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Outstanding Newcomer. He went on to play Romeo in Romeo And Juliet and then a critically acclaimed Othello at London's Donmar Warehouse in 2008.
Ejiofor's portrayal of Shakespeare's emotionally ravaged Moor won him the 2008 Olivier Award for best actor of the year, but the role of a man destroyed by a murderous jealousy continues to haunt him.
"I think it's a natural sequel to Romeo And Juliet," he says. "I think Shakespeare is always discussing love and the fragility of love."
Right now, he's itching to get back on stage. Two years away from the boards is long enough, he figures. But these days, he's pursuing a double-pronged acting career because of the growing lure of Hollywood.
"It feels like I'm based on a tiny island right in the middle of the Atlantic – and it's all of my making."
He lives in both London and Los Angeles and maintains a pad in both places.
Hollywood started taking real notice of him after the 2002 release of Dirty Pretty Things, the Stephen Frears film in which Ejiofor delivered an intense performance as an illegal Nigerian immigrant – a doctor whose desperation to practise his profession lands him in the ugliest depths of the London underworld. The Manchester Guardian called Ejiofor's work a "great silent scream of a performance" and its impact was such that Spike Lee and Woody Allen promptly signed him up for films.
He recently completed the thriller Salt, co-starring with Angelina Jolie and Liev Schreiber, with Phillip Noyce directing. Ejiofor, who switches accents with ease, plays a CIA counter-intelligence agent – "someone who's really trying to work out what's happening" – and again, he felt he'd been given a strongly drawn character and a script with the kind of complexity he likes.
"The paranoid thriller is such an interesting field, and it's so rarely done. The characters here are working on so many different levels, and I think a director like Phillip Noyce is able to bring out these elements – the nuances and subtlety, the claustrophobia."
The 2008 Queen's Birthday Honors named him an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his services to drama. But Ejiofor firmly believes acting is a collaborative effort, particularly when it comes to film, where the director can make or break a project.
"Directors are crucial. They are what films are about. Directors are the medium – this is a filmmaker's medium. An actor can do so much, but it's not like the theatre, where actors can feel that, potentially, they're having a powerful impact on the overall thing. A filmmaker has so much power and control that it does fall on the director to pull the thing through."
Actors who have worked with Emmerich say he ensures them a comfortable place in which to do their best. Ejiofor couldn't agree more, and that's why he found it so rewarding to work on a character who's prepared to stand up against some of the most powerful figures in the White House and press for a moral dimension to its decision-making at a time of world crisis.
"He has the capacity to become deeper and more interesting as the film goes on. But I didn't feel there were any stock characters in the movie. They were all very unique and rich, very different to each other. There was an opportunity to really play somebody, not just to be facilitating an excuse for narrative."
