In the nearly 20 years British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor has been working in movies, he’s built up one of the most impressive filmographies of any actor working. Let's face it, when your first movie role is in a Steven Spielberg movie (AMISTAD), you've set the bar high, and he's managed to build an impressive collection of characters since then, including an early starring role in Stephen Frears DIRTY PRETTY THINGS; worthy supporting roles in Richard Curtis' LOVE ACTUALLY, Spike Lee's SHE HATE ME, Woody Allen's MELINDA AND MELINDA, and John Singleton's FOUR BROTHERS; his piercing turn as The Operative in SERENITY; getting silly with KINKY BOOTS; getting serious as Denzel Washington's partner in INSIDE MAN (also for Spike Lee); heading a rebellion in CHILDREN OF MEN; his devastating work as the father of a missing child in HBO's TSUNAMI; and holding his own opposite Washington again in AMERICAN GANGSTER (as Frank Lucas' brother Henry) and Don Cheadle in TALK TO ME.
Ejiofor's winning streak continues as the central figure in writer-director David Mamet's REDBELT; Phillip Noyce’s SALT; Steve McQueen’s 12 YEARS A SLAVE (for which he received an Academy Award nomination); and just in last year, leading roles in Z FOR ZACHARIAH, THE MARTIAN, SECRET IN THEIR EYES, not to mention his stunning recent turn in the National Theatre production of “Everyman.” Later this year, we’ll see him as Baron Mordo in Marvel’s DOCTOR STRANGE film, and this week, you should absolutely catch him as an ex-Special Forces man turned criminal in TRIPLE 9, opposite Anthony Mackie, Casey Affleck, Aaron Paul, Kate Winslet, Gal Gadot, Norman Reedus, Clifton Collins Jr., and Woody Harrelson, all working for director John Hillcoat. It’s a hefty, aggressive, brutally violent exercise in filmmaking, and Ejiofor had to tap into a part of his acting skills we rarely get to see him flex. We chatted recently about the film. Please enjoy…
Chiwetel Ejiofor: Hi. Hey.
Capone: How are you?
CE: Very good. How are you?
Capone: Good. This is a little bizarre because I just saw you less than two weeks ago on the [REDACTED] set.
CE: Oh, you were there? That was interesting, wasn’t it?
Capone: That was a fun day.
CE: It was like a military meet in that tent. “The army of the enemy is stationed on the hill.” [laughs]
Capone: Exactly. yeah. So this character you’re playing in the film, Michael, he’s in an interesting position in this crew, because he’s not a police officer, so he doesn’t have to necessarily have to worry about his cover being blown. Obviously he doesn't want to get caught, but there’s less pretending for him. This is more of a mission. Did you feel like you had a little bit more freedom to play with him in that respect, since he wasn't beholden to the law like the other guys were?
CE: Sure. Yeah, that’s true. I hadn’t even articulated it quite like that myself, but that’s absolutely right. There’s an energy to playing Michael that’s about him being totally free to express who he is at any given point, which was really fun to engage with. He's somebody who doesn’t have to lie to anybody. He has no intention of ever having to really like lie to anybody or be duplicitous, essentially. He’s very honest to himself. That’s probably one of the good, interesting moral ticks about him. Everything else is completely morally corrupt, but he is what he is.
Capone: To play this part, did you get a little into that mindset that he’s being forced to do these things. There’s a “motivation” for him to do these things. Did you think back to when his corruption began, and how far back that goes?
CE: Of course. I felt like for me, it was the most fascinating backstory that I’ve almost ever really drawn for a character, because you just had to like encounter that first time. Where was the first time that he did something that was so morally bankrupt and carried on? For me, I always thought back to like the YouTube clip of Blackwater guys in Iraq when they run over that woman in that Humvee. And that sense that like, the driver did one thing, but then everybody else in there that didn’t stop at that point and say, “Listen, this can’t go on.” They’re all implicated in this moment. They crossed this line. And what does that look like 15 years later? What does that look like when you come back to the states? What does that look like if you maybe get involved with the mob? What do all of these things look like? That was a starting point of working out what might have been his experience in the military and what might have been his experience after that.
Capone: John Hillcoat does this a lot in his films where the lines between good guys and bad guys are beyond blurred in a lot of cases, and there’s an emotional depth to the bad guys. Especially your character, he’s doing this so he’s able to be with his son. John doesn’t like to sort of make bad guys bad guys. He wants you to understand them a little more, and understand that bad guys don't see themselves as bad guys.
CE: Yeah, totally. These guys are the heroes of their own universe. To a man and to a woman who controls them all in Irina [Kate Winslet’s character]. They are all totally in their own minds, totally justified; it’s illogical to even feel another way. And what i think is great is that this experience pushes even these people into a rationalization of what they’re doing in an attempt to investigate it. And that’s the chaos that comes in their own lives and internally in the dynamics of this group of people.
Capone: The scenes that you have with Kate Winslet are so great, because I didn’t even recognize her at first—the accent, that hair really throws you. But those scenes are great, because it’s wonderful to see, in this very male-centric film, that the woman is controlling them all, and that’s a great change up. My understanding is you guys never worked together or even met before this. Is that true?
CE: Yeah, I think that’s true. We never really crossed paths.
Capone: So then just talk about working with her in those scenes.
CE: Yeah. I remember reading the script and thinking obviously, like everyone else, I’m very familiar with her work and how terrific an actress she is, but when i read the script, I was like I don’t know this character. Sometimes you can read a script and you know everybody involved. So you have an expectation of what people are going to do with a part. But with this, I was like, I don’t know what this looks like actually. I don't know what this looks like, what it sounds like, I have no connection to this character in that way.
So I was like I’m really curious to see the first rehearsal in Atlanta what Kate does with this, you know what i mean? I was literally like, I’m just really curious to see. She came in, and we started to read scenes and she just completely inhabited this character, this whole persona, this terrifying persona. I was like, “Holy shit. That’s what that looks like.” I was just awestruck by how well prepared she was and how capable she was of just inhabiting this whole thing. It was really stunning. She’s fantastic, like everyone knows. She’s a terrific actress.
Capone: To get ready to play this part, I assume you went through some training to make the movements with the weapons look second nature, then also get physically fit. Is there a psychological component to getting into that regimen and to getting physically fit and having a routine like that?
CE: Sure. I was working out like mad. I was aware I had a few months from where I was at that time to starting the shoot was, it was a few months; I needed to get into proper shape so I could play this guy. And also to completely become a weapons… to make it second nature. So I did a lot of weapons training with Navy Seal guys and did combat tactics, maneuvers, it was all pretty full on and shot a lot live ammunition until I could understand a little bit about what the fog of war might feel like. And obviously, just talking to those guys and training with them and shooting with them. It took a while, but at some point I felt like something had clicked, and I had some insight into that universe. I had not really made a film with this amount of gunplay before, so connecting to that was a big part of it.
Capone: I couldn’t get it out of my head seeing you and Anthony Mackie in a movie together again, the first time since SHE HATE ME, and now you’re both these players, or you’re going to be soon, of the Marvel Universe. How far the two of you have come since that film.
CE: Yeah, that was a while ago since SHE HATE ME with Spike, and that was actually the very first time that I met Anthony. I think we were talking, and I remember us chatting about Julliard and our experiences with Lambda. I think he does great work, and it’s great to see him being a staple of all of these things.
Capone: Let me ask you about John Hillcoat then, because I’ve met him a couple of times, he seems like a very sweet man, but he makes some of the most terrifically violent films I’ve ever seen. He also makes violence look like it really hurts. It’s not something you can brush off the way it happens in action movies sometimes. Just tell me about his approach on set.
CE: Yeah, you ain’t walking away from this one [laughs]. I just think he encapsulates what all great great filmmakers have—a very, very watchful eye. That’s what I’ve always loved about his movies. He really does kind of embrace a very three-dimensional universe. When you watch a Hillcoat film, you are falling down the rabbit hole. You are totally immersed in whatever world he’s talking about. He does tireless research into every detail. And so actually in a film like this, there’s a million bits of information, and every frame is telling you something about Atlantis, something about those characters, something about this world, something about the moral universe we live in. He’s just somebody who’s so energized and so thoughtful and brings that to the set. He wants to see what actors do and he wants to capture it, which is why you can have eight or nine lead characters in a movie, and you come out feeling you know each and every one of them.
Capone: Alright, Chiwetel, thank you so much. It was great to talk to you again. Best of luck with this.
