David Oyelowo takes the civil rights fight to the acting profession.

Actor who plays Martin Luther King in Selma was early voice on racial inequality on screen and stage, friends suggest

David Oyelowo arrives for the European premiere of Selma in London. Photograph: Jack Taylor/AFP/Getty Images

There’s a theatrical anecdote in which the wife of a leading performer advises a friend: “I wouldn’t come round for lunch on Sunday if I were you. He’s playing Stalin at the moment.”
In a more benevolent example of the phenomenon of actors overlapping with their characters, David Oyelowo, while promoting his role as the African-American civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King in the movie Selma, has become a leader of the fight for racial equality in his own profession.
He complained that British TV’s lack of interest in telling “black stories” had forced him to work in America, while not sparing his adopted culture either, acknowledging “hurt” at the lack of recognition from the predominantly white Oscar voters for Selma, including his own omission, despite adulatory reviews, from the 2015 Best Actor shortlist.

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Paula Milne, who wrote the scripts for the BBC drama Small Island, one of Oyelowo’s few major British roles, says: “For someone like David it’s an issue of principle to add his voice to that cause, no matter what the risk to his career. But perhaps inhabiting Luther King in Selma heightened his sense of public duty and quiet rage.”
However, while the reporting of Oyelowo’s post-Selma remarks has tended to suggest a man finally driven to speak out by a decade and a half of restricted casting and white actors dominating prize ceremonies, he was, in fact, notably outspoken on this issue from very early on. Interviewed in 2001, only two years into his professional career, for an Observer report on whether British theatre suffered racial inequality, he gave a flamethrower quote, suggesting that even good reviews were suspect. He said: “I think there’s so much backhanded criticism that seems to say ‘Isn’t it great how good they are – considering they’re black?’”
At that time, Oyelowo was involved in what must now be described as the first major racial controversy of his career. Michael Boyd, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, had cast him in the title role of Shakespeare’s Henry VI.
Although this was actually a sort of typecasting – the actor’s grandfather had been a king in western Nigeria – one rightwing columnist wondered if theatregoers should now look forward to Sir Anthony Hopkins as Nelson Mandela. And the RSC postbag bulged. “There were letters written on wonky typewriters from white supremacists,” Boyd says.

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Watch a video interview with Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo

Oyelowo was only 24, experiencing his first burst of publicity in troubling circumstances. So did Boyd have to nurse him through the experience? “Oh, no,” he says. “Even as a boy actor, David was far more sophisticated about all that than I ever could be. He knew he was going to get it, from having grown up in a western culture.”
That upbringing had been in Oxford and London as the son of a Nigerian couple of Yoruba heritage. As was common for immigrants to Britain in the middle third of the 20th century, his parents had found the transport infrastructure a welcoming employer: his mother working for British Rail, his father for the pre-privatised British Airways. Encouraged by a school teacher to act, he graduated from Lamda and was rapidly signed up in 1999 by the RSC, where his first major role was race-specific – in Oroonoko by Biyi Bandele – but the others were from the white classical canon.

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During an RSC tour to Newcastle at the turn of the millennium, the company took part in a “movement workshop” with the local Northern Stage company. It was during these non-verbal exercises that Boyd became aware of the actor’s possibilities: “He was extraordinarily physically inventive and impressive – blinding. And I saw then what he had in that boiler.” Does a director know at that stage that someone will be a star? “Not will, because there is so much luck involved in acting careers. But could. I knew he could be.”

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TV talent scouts routinely tour theatres in the search for new talent and the RSC season led to Oyelowo being cast in BBC1’s Spooks as MI5 case officer Danny Hunter, an attractive and charismatic character who was given one of TV’s most striking death scenes, provoking a terrorist to kill him in order to save the life of a colleague. The awful power of the moment, when Danny makes a silent prayer before sacrificing himself, felt informed by the actor’s background as a committed Christian.
He had asked to be written out of the spy show because of the quantity of other offers coming in and this visibility led to Small Island, adapted from Andrea Levy’s novel about first-generation British immigrants, Small Island. Milne says: “The most important quality in a screen actor is when they truly understand the subtle nuance of screen acting. That less is more. When you add to that humour (if appropriate) and truth (always appropriate) in a performance you have the full package. This is what David Oyelowo gives you.”
Milne remembers his meticulous work with a voice coach to reproduce exactly the pre-war Jamaican accent. Because the way Oyelowo looks is inevitably significant – and, in the casting row, political – his verbal skills can be overlooked. But, in one of his most extraordinary performances, he isn’t seen at all.

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Watch a video review of Selma

John le Carré, a first-class mimic who usually records the audio-book versions of his novels, realised that it would be inappropriate to voice The Mission Song, his 2006 book narrated by a black British character. Oyelowo substituted for the novelist and subtly differentiated characters male and female, white and black.
His formidable visual presence, though, is his fortune. For Boyd, his most important quality of an actor is that “there is a complete absence of any visible join between mind and body. To him an ‘idea’ is not an abstract theory. You can see how that helped him to play Martin Luther King.”
Even without an Oscar nomination, the actor is now a big star but colleagues do not expect the explosion of ego and implosion of lifestyle that movie celebrity often brings. “David is extraordinarily unassuming as an actor,” Milne says. “I think this is partly due to his strong Christian faith that is clearly a kind of moral anchor in a profession that can be notoriously amoral in its dealings.”

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Milne also points out that, when Small Island was shot, Oyelowo had already emigrated to Los Angeles – where he lives with his wife Jessica and their four children – where his movie career was beginning. Even so “he didn’t hesitate to jump at the role, even though it meant decamping from the US, a modest fee and a punishing TV production schedule – such was his commitment to the project. He never paraded his burgeoning glittering career – he just got on with the job in hand.”
Off camera, Oyelowo’s new job is trying to change the casting attitudes of British TV and the voting habits on the Oscar ballots. Milne believes that the industry in the UK does have to look hard at why Oyelowo, Idris Elba, Sophie Okenedo and Thandie Newton all had to go abroad to win major roles: “Actions speak louder than words and if the UK really was providing a plethora of non-white screen roles that reflect our society, then undoubtedly so many of our black actors would not have felt the need to migrate over the pond. Hopefully the fact they are now being vocal about the issue will help reverse the pattern.”
Boyd points out that, while subsidised theatre in the UK has a reasonable record of giving roles to non-white actors, commercial theatre does not, with Lenny Henry the only regular black West End leading man: “Once it touches the purse strings [casting] becomes an issue.” So which theatre role would he like to see David Oyelowo play? “Hamlet. Next year, please.”

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Watch the trailer for Selma

David Oyelowo: a profile

Born: April 1, 1976, Oxford
Career: Soon after leaving drama school, he was cast as Henry VI by the RSC, becoming the first black actor to play one of Shakespeare’s English kings. This led to a supporting role in Spooks ands leading roles in Small Island and Complicit, a Channel 4 drama in which he plays a western intelligence officer who tortures an Arab terrorist suspect. Movie roles include The Butler, The Paperboy and Selma.
Highpoint: His performance as Martin Luther King jr in Selma, a performance that combines perfect impersonation with intelligent interpretation.
Lowpoint: Being denied a 2015 Oscar nomination for MLK in Selma.
He says: ‘I consider myself a human being, a Christian, a father, a husband, so many things, before being a black person.’
They say: ‘King’s evocative messages – brilliantly brought to the screen by Oyelowo – still seem as moving and relevant as they were 50 years ago’ - Sydney Morning Herald on Selma.

theguardian.