A graduate of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in the late 1990s, Oyelowo has been seen by most Americans largely in supporting roles in such films as THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, Kenneth Branagh’s AS YOU LIKE IT (as Orlando), HBO’s “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series, RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, THE HELP, RED TAILS, LINCOLN, JACK REACHER, THE BUTLER, as the school principal in INTERSTELLAR, A MOST VIOLENT YEAR, CAPTIVE, last year’s exception QUEEN OF KATWE, and the Nina Simone biopic NINA. He’s also currently voicing the recurring character of Agent Kallus in the “Star Wars: Rebels” animated series. But he’s probably best known for his exquisite portrayal of a deeply flawed, yet no less heroic Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 2014’s SELMA.
Oyelowo has a healthy slate of films for us in 2017 as well, beginning with his current release A UNITED KINGDOM, the true-life story of Prince Seretse Khama of Botswana, who in the late 1940s was living and attending university in London when he falls in love with a white woman (Rosamund Pike, who co-starred with Oyelowo in JACK REACHER), causing an international incident on two continents, fueled partly by politics and primarily by racism. The film is beautifully acted, and is slowly opening across the country now. Later in the year, expect to see Oyelowo in two films: one untitled action-comedy directed by Nash Edgerton and co-starring the likes of Nash’s brother Joel Edgerton, Charlize Theron, Thandie Newton, Amanda Seyfried, and Sharlto Copley. The other is GOD PARTICLE, produced by J.J. Abrams and co-starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Daniel Brühl, Chris O’Dowd, and Ziyi Zhang. The plot of that one is top secret, but it sure does sound a lot like another in the CLOVERFIELD series, with its story set among astronauts aboard a space station.
Oyelowo is pure joy to speak to, which I did for SELMA as well a couple years ago. He’s a versatile actor who isn’t afraid to do both serious-minded works and true-life stories to thought-provoking genre films. A UNITED KINGDOM is a deeply emotional work that will move you to your core, and I quite like the way it makes the complicated seem understandable. With that, please enjoy my talk with David Oyelowo…
Capone: I’m sure a lot of people have brought up the fact that you and Rosamund had worked together before, but what I don’t think a lot of people are picking up on is that you and the screenwriter [Guy Hibbert] had worked together a couple of times before too. You’re also a producer on the film. How did this all come together, and you and Guy work on this screenplay in tandem?
David Oyelowo: Well, pretty much anyone in a significant role, both in terms of our production team and cast, were people that I had worked with before, and that’s born out of the fact that I first happened upon this story in 2010, when a producer I was working with showed me this book “Colour Bar” that Susan Williams had written. And I became very determined to see this as a movie, because I couldn’t believe I didn’t know the story, and it just felt so right for a cinematic treatment.
So what happened was I was doing RED TAILS with [producer] Rick McCallum, who I bugged with my desire to see this film get made, and he caught the vision and came on as producer, as was the case with [producer] Brunson Green, who I did THE HELP with. And as you say, Guy Hibbert and I had done two BBC films, one called BLOOD AND OIL, another called COMPLICIT. I really loved him as a writer and felt like this is material he would be able to get his arms around, which he did, and then Pathé who I was in the middle of developing SELMA with came on board, and Amma [Asante, director], who I had worked with 19 years ago—one of my first jobs out of drama school she wrote.
Capone: For television?
DO: Yeah, yeah. And then as you say, Rosamund. So it was basically a labor of love that I virally infected all of my friends with.
Capone: Just surround yourself with good people and every once in a while, call in those favors and say, “Hey, let’s do this.”
DO: 100 percent.
Capone: With Amma, her last one was fairly well known, BELLE. What made you think of her and that she would be a good fit for this material?
DO: It was BELLE, really. Seeing BELLE and seeing how well she was able to balance an element of that story, which I felt we needed for this story, which is the love story with a political backdrop, and that’s not easy to do. Often, one can overwhelm the other and therefore diminish the other, and for me, I always felt that this should be a love story primarily, but you can’t pay short shrift to the politics, and the politics in this world are very dense. It’s the politics of three different countries, it’s the politics of 70 years ago, and I just felt that her handling of BELLE and who she is culturally and how synonymous that is with me. Both born in the UK, both of African decent, this is a story that of course traverses both the UK and an African country, and I just felt that she had exactly the right comprehensive overview for the film.
Capone: What I found fascinating about the film is that it isn’t just about this white-dominated, UK society coming down on this interracial marriage; there’s racism on two continents here. The resistance was coming from all sides, not just from the Imperial overlords. Talk about that aspect of this story.
DO: That to me is why the story is so potent, because it shows the power of love, one, but it also shows that prejudice is not something that is exclusive to white people [laughs]. And if you watch movies or are someone who is tapped into what’s going on in the news, that can be a misconception. So that, like I say, is something that of course I know to be true, but we very rarely get to see.
But I had the same reaction: I didn’t know this story. I’m a person of African decent. I should know this story, but the reason we don’t is there was very bad behavior on the part of Great Britain, and what tends to happen is we bury our bad history. I think America is guilty of exactly the same thing when it comes to Native Americans and other patches of history that aren’t necessarily the finest hour of any given country, and that’s when these stories get buried.
Capone: I think I read somewhere that the son of your character is the current president of Botswana?
DO: Yes.
Capone: Did you get to meet him? Has he seen the film?
DO: Yeah, we got to meet him under the craziest of circumstances. We were shooting a scene. I don’t know if you remember it, but it’s a scene with Rosamund and Terry Pheto who plays Naledi, my sister in the film. Rosamund is trying to buy corn flower, and this woman is not very forthcoming, and I’m behind the monitor watching this scene with them, and we suddenly hear this helicopter very loudly in the middle of nowhere in Botswana. It lands. Out steps the president, who had flown himself there on his own, steps out, comes and sits down next to me behind the monitor, starts watching, and then leans into me soon after watching this scene Rosamund’s playing out and says, “I never thought I’d see my parents again.” So that’s how we met him, not only the president but their son. It just so happens that the film has coincided with Botswana’s 50th anniversary of independence, so the film has been a big part of their celebration.
Capone: That’s great. Films have been made in the past about Imperial Britain losing it’s hold begrudgingly in various parts of the world. In this one in particular, it’s very clear that Winston Churchill has lied at one point, and it’s not that you avoid it, but I’ve always heard that there’s an unwritten rule that you can’t say bad things about Winston Churchill. You very deafly skirt that a little bit here by putting these other, much more evil faces in front of your character. Was there any hesitation about pointing the finger?
DO: [laughs] No, I don’t think we skirt around the fact that Winston Churchill lied at all. It’s patently there. The choice we made is to not have him in the movie, so to speak, and that’s because he’s such a larger-than-life character. I’ve seen him depicted in other movies briefly, and it actually has the effect of pulling you out of the film, because you start going “Does that actor sound like him, look like him? That’s that interesting historical figure. What’s he doing?”
Capone: And it’s always some actor you absolutely know, and you’re thinking, “Let’s judge this Churchill against other Churchills.”
DO: Exactly. Exactly! It’s like having Hamlet do a cameo in “Timon of Athens”; it’s just not good for storytelling, so that’s the reason we chose to keep him out. To me, that chapter, both in British history and in our film, shows that politics a lot of the time, no matter how admirable the leader, there are individuals who are deemed collateral damage in order for a political choice to be made.
In this instance, it was the appeasing of South Africa, a country that had just brought in Apartheid. And because you needed their mineral resources, you decided to effectively go on and validate very questionable choices that country was making for your own economic good. Now it’s understandable. You’re coming out of a second World War that’s been financially very debilitating, so you can understand to a certain extent, but it doesn't make what happened to Ruth and Seretse any more permissible.
Capone: There are a lot of moving pieces in this story—behind the scenes political things, more public political things, there’s a love story, there are all the things happening in Botswana with the uncle. There are a lot of opportunities to get lost in this. Talk about fine tuning that screenplay to both boil it down to its essentials yet not oversimplify things. How many times did you have to go back and go “No, that’s too complicated.”
DO: It was a very tricky film to put together from a developmental point of view, and one of the things that certainly convinced me that Amma was absolutely the right person to direct it was that she came in and said “We can’t jettison the politics, but what we have to do is make sure that everything political in the film is something that is moving the love story forward.”
So none of the politics, none of the more convoluted things in the film are episodes that are isolated. They all go through the prism of Ruth and Seretse’s relationship, their marriage, their desire to be together, the intentions of others to keep them apart. Everything goes through them, and I think that’s the way to hold it all together. I like to think we managed to do that with the film, but it’s a tricky balance.
Capone: To that end, you really get a sense of how much they were in love when they are kept apart, and that in turn sells the political elements as well. Talk about just having Rosamund play this part. Why was she the right person as an actor to capture this character?
DO: I had always loved her as an actress, and we obviously got to work together in JACK REACHER, and I got to know her a bit more as a person. The qualities that she possesses that I thought just really lend themselves to this character…you can never truly tell what a Rosamund Pike performance is going to be. There are other actresses where you go “I can see what that will probably be. I couldn’t picture her as Ruth, but I knew she was a great actress, and I knew that she had an enigmatic quality that would hopefully make you understand why this prince meets this girl and falls in love very quickly. There is something alluring about her, I find.
Then on top of that, when I spoke to her about the project, when I sent her photographs of Ruth and Seretse, she had a very emotional reaction. She emailed me back in tears saying “I’m here in tears and I don’t know who these people are, but I need to know more.” Within a week or two of that, she was on the film. For someone who had just been nominated for an Oscar, that just doesn’t happen. You’re going through layers of agents to just try and access them because they’re a very hot property, and she just cleared the deck and was like “I want to do this.” Those were all reasons why she ended up with us.
Capone: I love that you do these very serious, issue-oriented films, but then you also have a strong foothold in genre works. Do you deliberately set out not to repeat yourself? Is that important to you?
DO: Yeah, big time. The actors I admire the most are ones who you can’t pin down. Like Rosamund, you can’t predict what a Daniel Day-Lewis performance is going to be. You know it’s going to be interesting and good, and you know that his choices are always compelling, but you can’t call it, what it’s going to be, and that’s what I aspire to do, and I think the way to do that is to keep the audience guessing because you can’t be pinned down. I’m at risk in playing another leader like Seretse Khama, having played Dr. King, of people saying “That’s the historical leader guy,” but you will not catch me playing someone like Seretse or Dr. King for a good while again, because that is something I’m very cognizant of.
Capone: I wish I had made it to New York to see you in Othello last year [opposite Daniel Craig], but are you guys making that jump from off-Broadway to a bigger Broadway theater? Is that still a possibility? I know it was discussed a great deal as you wrapped things up a few weeks ago.
DO: Who knows. There seems to be a real appetite for it. I loved what we did in that tiny little theater in the East Village. Never say never, is what I would say. I honestly don’t know what the plans are for it, but I know that there’s appetite for it.
Capone: You’re also in the Nash Edgerton film. Where you here shooting that? Because I know he shot a lot of that in Chicago.
DO: Yes. Yes, exactly right. Exactly right.
Capone: I moderated a Q&A with Jeff Nichols for MIDNIGHT SPECIAL last year, and Joel just showed up by surprise, because he happened to be in town helping out Nash with his film. I don’t know anything about it. Can you tell anything about what you’re doing in that?
DO: Yeah, it’s an action comedy and it’s a very different speed for me, and I basically play a guy who just makes really bad choices, and Charlize Theron and Joel Edgerton play my bosses in that film, and it also stars Thandie Newton, Amanda Seyfried, Sharlto Copley; we’re trying to keep some of the bigger story elements under wraps.
Capone: Including the title, apparently.
DO: [laughs] Yes, including the title. But yeah, all I can tell you is I do a lot of running away from a lot of questionable people.
Capone: It was great to see you again. Thank you so much. Best of luck with this.
