One From The Archives: The Interview: Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

[“T]he vorpal blade went snicker-snack. He left it dead, and with its head he went galumphing back.”
With our shoot over and the video interview about to begin, the Hunger crew have asked Chiwetel Ejiofor to say something – anything – for a soundcheck.
He deadpans the above, staring intently into the camera, his face betraying nothing. Nobody dares question it. It’s certainly consonant rich, and possibly a more malevolent soundcheck than expected. It’s from Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, in fact, although via Ejiofor’s larynx, it sounds like Shakespeare.
“I think it’s a good idea,” he says, having been told we’re not retouching the photos. In Hunger, no imperfections are to be perfected, no legs to be lengthened. “I’ve always thought retouching was a bit weird, especially with actors,” he says. “Film is a pretty fair representation of what people look like, with a little bit of makeup – people have an understanding of what actors look like anyway, from their work, so it seems a little peculiar. They aren’t necessarily models, are they? So it always seemed a little strange to me to try to enforce these ideas of beauty on to actors. We don’t really do the same thing.”
Indeed. Now 36, Ejiofor has been inhabiting others since he was a kid. He abandoned the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art not halfway through for his first film proper, Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, and he’s been blazing trails since, consistently captivating, racking up awards, batting off plaudits and bagging an OBE. What comes next, though, is something else.
Following up his wonderfully depressing sex addiction odyssey Shame, British director Steve McQueen (with screenwriter John Ridley) has adapted 12 Years a Slave, the memoir of the same name, written in 1853 by Solomon Northup. A well-to-do family man from New York, Northup was born free and built a good life for himself as a carpenter and accomplished violinist; in 1841, at the age of 33, he was duped, drugged, kidnapped, sold into slavery and shipped to Louisiana, where he would spend the next 12 years in servitude, horrendously mistreated by abusive masters, categorised as sub-human, with little room for optimism and no hope of escape. When he eventually did find freedom, he was encouraged to write a book detailing his misfortune, and a fantastic book it is, a novelistic page-turner of vivid detail. At any one point you’ll find eloquent, affecting, engrossing prose. “The night before his departure I was wholly given up to despair,” Northup writes of a man he at one point hopes can provide salvation. “I had clung to him as a drowning man clings to the floating spar, knowing if it slips from his grasp he must forever sink beneath the waves.” The film, which also stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender, Paul Dano and Brad Pitt, is deeply touching, unrelenting in its doom, yet with a spirit as beautiful as its aesthetic. “I don’t want to survive. I want to live,” bursts Northup at one point, channelled as a force of nature by Ejiofor, who makes you feel everything he’s feeling, whether you like it or not. To watch it is to be both exhausted and emboldened.
“It was a completely new world to me,” says Ejiofor, who had not heard of the book when McQueen sent him the screenplay. “I found it extraordinary that I didn’t know this story to begin with, and when I read it I had this incredible reaction to it. It was a really powerful screenplay, but also this extraordinary true story of a really exceptional person. I had a conversation with Steve to talk about the possibilities of doing it, and how complicated and difficult it might be… and almost how wary I was of it.”
It’s easy to see why an actor would feel such a sense of responsibility to Northup. His book, while not particularly well-known, is of great cultural and historical significance, despite his statement at the end that he has “no comments to make upon the subject of slavery.” This is merely his singular experience, he writes. Northup, who became a key abolitionist after regaining his freedom, is a man of staggering humility. “Having been born a freeman,” he writes in the opening chapter, “and for more than thirty years enjoyed the blessings of liberty in a free State – and having at the end of that time been kidnapped and sold into slavery, where I remained, until happily rescued in the month of January, 1853, after a bondage of twelve years – it has been suggested that an account of my life and fortunes would not be uninteresting to the public.”
Has there ever been an introduction of such aching understatement? “Solomon Northup has this extraordinary understated quality,” Ejiofor agrees. “He has it in his writing; he has it in the descriptions that he uses of slavery, of his experiences, of how he interprets those experiences, and how he perceives they will be received by the public. And there was something that was quite telling about that for me, that he is a person who’s able to deal with life in a very calculated and very humble way. He has a very strong sense of humility. And in a way, that characteristic is very helpful for him on his odyssey. That he understood what his rights were as an individual. He was never so self-involved as to lose his mind through the context of what he was going through. I felt like that was an extraordinary thing to play, and I think that that’s part of the book. There’s a real quality in it that allowed me into the psychology of somebody who could survive an experience like that, and remain physically and psychologically intact.”
“Northup’s story deserves recognition as a seminal piece of literature,” Ejiofor says. For whatever reason, slavery is finally being afforded substantial big-screen respect – following Tarantino’s Django Unchained and Spielberg’s Lincoln, pop culture discourse on the subject is growing, although “that’s not particularly one of the film’s intentions,” Ejiofor indicates. “If it provokes a conversation, that’s great, but I think it’s really just an extraordinary story, and puts people into a really remarkable experience that speaks to us all about the sense of the human spirit and its triumphant ability through all adversity. One of the unique things about Solomon Northup’s autobiography is that it is being inside the experience. It is a person who was absolutely a hundred percent inside the institution, and that’s why, not only as a primary document, as a historical record is it of value, but I think as a film, 12 Years a Slave is quite unique, as the book is. Because it’s a very educated man’s first-hand account of the slave trade. And there aren’t many documents like that. So in that sense it has its own place.”
It’s certainly a world away from Django Unchained’s thrills and spills. That film was criticised by some for exploiting the subject matter in the name of entertainment; voices were most outspoken regarding the spin-off action figures, which were subsequently pulled from distribution. Similarly, Spielberg himself reportedly objected to Roberto Benigni for making entertainment of the Holocaust with his 1997 film, Life is Beautiful. The question of what one should and should not do regarding the treatment of such content is complex. Indeed, Stanley Kubrick, who in the 1990s abandoned plans to make his own Holocaust film, once privately criticised Spielberg’s Schindler’s List for being “about success… The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List was about 600 people who don’t.” “To truly make a film about the subject,” said Kubrick, “it would have to be virtually unwatchable.”
And much of 12 Years a Slave is just that, at times almost unbearably harrowing. There is, resolutely, no levity whatsoever, and the film is all the more effective for it. “I think it would have been disingenuous to Solomon Northup and to his legacy and to what he experienced if we tried to, for want of a better expression, commercialise it a little bit more and to make it perhaps lighter in order to achieve an ease amongst the people coming in to see it,” says Ejiofor. “In a sense there wouldn’t have been any point in making the film, because you should just make another film. We wanted to make the film as a truthful and accurate representation as we could of Solomon Northup’s life and experience, and hope that in being specific about that it then connected in a much wider way to the ideas of the human spirit and of real perseverance and strength and inner strength, and the beauty of the experience of life. Even though there is a bleakness to it, I think what Solomon Northup is always striving for is to reconnect with something beautiful, with something joyous of spirit. And I think that does tell us quite a lot about people, and what we want.”
Ejiofor’s performance is tremendously physical, which contributed to the already mental strain of the work. “The filming process was like falling down the rabbit hole,” he says. “You’re never quite sure whether you’re coming out the other side, and I think for all of us, myself and Michael Fassbender [who plays a particularly unmerciful slave owner] and Lupita Nyong’o [who plays a similarly mistreated ally], for a lot of that journey we really had to wrestle with this experience in this really visceral way, so it took, in the end, quite a long time to kind of fully come out of that. It was very all-encompassing. And shooting in Louisiana in those kind of temperatures really added to the insanity of that situation, and leant itself to at least a glimpse of an understanding of the insanity that these people were existing in at the time. It was a pretty exhausting experience.”
Watching the film, with all its fighting and hacking and whipping and howling, you’d think Ejiofor would have been ready to collapse at the end of each day. He’s known for disappearing into his roles, and this is a hell of a role to disappear into. “I like to submerge myself to the point that I’m not self-conscious about what I’m doing,” he says, although he’s not exactly method, and certainly wasn’t here. “On this film there wasn’t a massive amount of opportunity to really immerse oneself in it after hours. It was enough to do it as it was. The time that we had shooting, I was as fully immersed as possible, and I think we all needed our release afterwards and on the weekends, and New Orleans was a big help with that, we’d live a little large on the weekends then get back to it on Monday.” At one point, the 12 Years crew hooked up with Tarantino’s posse, which sends the mind reeling: “Django Unchained was being filmed in New Orleans when we were filming it, so I met up with Sam Jackson, and there was a big joint party that we both had at somebody’s place.” Oh, to have been at that shindig.
12 Years a Slave is guaranteed to cause a stir, by way of its performances, its content and its artistry. It is gorgeously staged and photographed, without ever being distractingly so – as stunning as the shots may be, they serve only to service the film, to heighten the tone, enabling you to wallow in its world. This being Hunger’s Revolutionary Issue, we ask Ejiofor to muse on the term in the context of the film industry, and talk of the film’s director is inescapable. “It depends on how you term revolutionary,” he says of the former Turner Prize winner. “Steve is an extraordinary filmmaker, and he comes from a slightly different background, and I think that that’s created a very interesting place for him to make films. I think it’s great when people aren’t all that familiar with the way things work, and come in by their own rules and logic and sense of how things could be, and he does that. He has a very unique style. This is just his third film, and he’s already established himself as what he is, an extraordinary filmmaker and talent. If the term revolutionary can be applied to that, then he would be.”
Ejiofor is no stranger to playing revolutionary characters, the most notable being the psychotically militant Luke in 2006’s Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón’s bleak vision of the near future. Ejiofor recently filmed Half of a Yellow Sun, an adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel set during the Nigerian-Biafran War in the late 1960s, and in that too, his character, a university professor, harbours revolutionary desires. “Well, he’d be accused of being a revolutionary,” he says. “He’s more of an armchair anarchist. But in Nigeria at that time, with a period of such change happening, the pursuit of not only independence but the separation of Biafra from the rest of Nigeria, which led to the civil war… the people who were promoting that separation could easily be characterised as revolutionary.”
It’s a film that means a lot to Ejiofor. He descends from the Igbo people – his parents left Nigeria for England during the height of the war and Half of a Yellow Sun, he says, holds true to the stories his grandfather told him about. Ejiofor is friends with Biyi Bandele, who wrote the screenplay and developed it with him in mind. Such a large film hadn’t been shot in Nigeria before, and working there had a profound effect on him. “I was very connected to it,” he says. “My grandfather towards the end of his life lived in Enugu, and would often go down to the University of Nsukka, which is where Chimamanda Adichie’s parents are still professors, so there was always a deep connection to the area and to the experiences with the Biafran civil war and the three year long massacre of the Igbo people, of which I am one. So I was very conscious of it. I was very aware of it as a book, and I was very excited at the prospect of going to Nigeria and playing this part. Years before I’d spent a lot of time with my grandfather talking about the Biafran war and his experiences, and they were such a seminal point of his life. Those three years really did affect and change everything about his world view, and his reaction to almost everything was influenced by what happened there. And also my parents leaving Nigeria, me being born in east London – all of this is connected to this war. So it had a very important significance to me historically, and is a beautiful story, so I was excited to be part of it. In many ways I was telling the story of my grandfather, almost his exact experiences of the Biafran war. It was a very enriching experience.”
12 Years a Slave may not be quite so personal a story, but in many ways it’s resonated with him just as powerfully. And just as shooting Half of a Yellow Sun in Nigeria enhanced his experience, filming in Louisiana brought him closer to Solomon Northup. Settling into research for the film, he began investigating the wider context of slavery, “not only in America but also in the West Indies,” he says. “I tried to get a real understanding of what life was like on the plantations. Shooting in Louisiana and being able to visit these places was very important as a part of that. I turned up a little bit early and was able to really get involved with the place, the location, the geography of it. It allowed me to build up an idea of what Solomon’s world was. It was really valuable physically being there, shooting in the height of summer in Louisiana, all the timber and the cotton and the sugar cane, everything being very visceral, very alive, very present.”
He’s seen the film once, although this month he’s going to the Toronto Film Festival, at which both 12 Years a Slave and Half of a Yellow Sun are being treated to big premieres. The festival is his. He’s hardly lacking in status or star power, but he’s about to go stratospheric, and rightly so. Toronto, if you’re reading: bring some hankies. 12 Years a Slave will put you through the wringer. What was it like though, for Ejiofor, watching it for the first time? Is it possible for an actor to detach himself from his own experience and fall under a film’s spell? “I thought that I’d be watching it in an objective way, almost clinically, having worked so hard on it and being involved in so many of the choices that we all made,” he says. “So I did think that I wouldn’t necessarily be caught up in it. But I was surprised to find myself going on the journey with the character. Steve has done an incredible job. It was an extraordinary experience to go on. It’s really something very special, I think.”
 hungertv.