London-born stage actor Chiwetel Ejiofor first entered cinema with 1997's Amistad, but his breakthrough came five years later, with his memorably adept, sensitive starring role in Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things. That film put him on the map, and roles followed fast and thick, in Spike Lee's She Hate Me and Inside Man, Woody Allen's Melinda And Melinda, John Singleton's Four Brothers, Ridley Scott's American Gangster, and Kasi Lemmons' Talk To Me. Most memorably, he played the chilly antagonist known as The Operative in Joss Whedon's Firefly spin-off Serenity, the more hot-blooded antagonist Luke in Children Of Men, and the flamboyant transvestite Lola in Kinky Boots. Ejiofor's latest starring role, in David Mamet's Redbelt, has him playing a passionately principled jujitsu instructor trying to navigate moral challenges in a typically complicated Mamet web. The A.V. Club recently sat down with Ejiofor to discuss the process of becoming an instant martial-arts master, his "nervous disposition," and what people don't realize about their favorite actors.
The A.V. Club: Your bios frequently mention that you go by the nickname "Chewie." Is that a voluntary nickname, or something you got stuck with?
Chiwetel Ejiofor: I actually don't like it at all. And I try and get people not to do that. Without being dogmatic. It's just an abbreviation of my name that's stuck with people. It's just one of those things where I'm trying to remove an abbreviation of my name. It's really tough.
AVC: Especially when it's in every bio.
CE: Yeah, exactly.
AVC: What kind of preparation went into your character in Redbelt?
CE: It was mainly centered around the physical side of the role. I started out in London working with the Gracie family, the premier family in Brazilian jujitsu. They're based out of Brazil, but they have academies in various places. So Roger Gracie's academy in London is where I started. I started the basics and the groundwork, and began to learn the philosophies of jujitsu. And then I came to L.A., and carried on working there for a month or so, with the Machado family, Jean Jacques and Renato Magno who runs the gym up in Los Angeles and Santa Monica. They were the group mainly involved in the choreography and the fights in the film, but they were also very instructive in the ideas, the philosophies of jujitsu. Then I went to see jujitsu in action—just went to the fights and met a lot of the people, and got to be really involved in the scene. And that was a way of understanding what was at stake for everybody, what these characters' motivations and philosophies are.
AVC: Is there a pressure involved in all that? People train their entire lives to become martial-arts masters. As an actor, you're told "Here's your two months on the scene. Become a convincing martial-arts master."
CE: Yeah, it's tough. When I first read the script, it's like, you don't know how to do what's required in the script. When I did Kinky Boots, I had the same amount of time, and I just didn't know how it was possible. I wanted to do the part, but I was like, "I don't know." I think the more you do, the more you work as an actor, you realize you have to be a quick study. It is very intense. But most people starting martial arts won't get the high-level people I got to work with, giving them one-on-one training for every day of the week. So when somebody studies a year, maybe what we're talking about is going to two classes a week with a group of 20 other people. I was doing several hours a day with some of the best people in the world, with nobody else. It was able to accelerate my adjustment where I began to feel more comfortable doing the kind of stuff that was required. In no way could I suggest that I was at any kind of level where I could actually engage in a realistic way with any of these other fighters, or even David [Mamet] himself, because their training is sort of beyond me. But I could understand enough of the physical to embody the character.
AVC: Is there any sort of set process you go through in building characters that would have encompassed both Kinky Boots and Redbelt? Were there any similarities?
CE: I think with Kinky Boots and this, there was kind of a parallel in the sense that you put on the immediate facets of this character. You start to grow into the character from there. You start to learn about movement. In Kinky Boots and Lola, it was trying to walk in heels. In Redbelt, it's how to deliver a flying arm bar. Once you get those down, you start to learn how to play a character. In that sense, there was a similar approach, which I've not really applied to anything else. There was a distinct physical aspect to this part and Kinky Boots that just wasn't true for everything else.
AVC: What about when you're playing a historical figure like in American Gangster? Is there a very different process for that?
CE: In American Gangster, it was just being able to get a sense for the world they were in. There wasn't a particularly intensive rehearsal, really. It was reading articles about Frank Lucas and getting to know the context of the time. And you know, things tend to bleed into each other. When I came over to do Talk To Me, for example, I did a lot of research around the time. It just seemed really important to know a lot about the political situation, and the ramifications of what was happening. And I ended up doing American Gangster not long after wrapping on Talk To Me. So a lot of it bled into that. I was sort of up to speed on what was leading into the '60s and '70s.
AVC: Do you tend to find your characters more on your own before the production starts, via research and training, or do you find it more in rehearsal, or on the set?
CE: Well, I like finding things out beforehand, because I'm nervous in disposition, and I worry that if I don't do anything, then I'll turn up and I still won't really have a sense of it, and it might be too late. So I like to get things as organized as I possibly can in my own head, to apply myself to the work before arriving to a late-in-the-day rehearsal, or in extreme cases, the first day on set. But you know, not everybody works like that, and I understand that there are different ways to work. And actually being more open to it—obviously not in a circumstance like Redbelt, because if you turned up on the first day without any jujitsu knowledge, you couldn't do the film. But I understand that some projects, you can come into with much less knowledge of what's going on, and sort of catch up and feel your way around it. I think it's a risky way to approach the work. Maybe I'm not brave enough. I'd rather just work on it, find out what's going on, and use that to apply to a character.
AVC: It seems odd that you describe yourself as having a nervous disposition, given that so many of your key roles are very calm, centered, focused people—in this, Serenity, Dirty Pretty Things. Are you attracted to that kind of character because you consider yourself a nervous person?
CE: I think I liked them all because I found them to be terrifically written roles. I wonder if I end up bringing to them a certain quality, just because it interests me to bring that to a character. It could all be more nervy, I guess. And that would just be a slightly different take on the characters themselves. But I feel like I only select roles based on how they impact me when I read. They're all very strong, incredibly detailed characters.
AVC: Getting back to the finding-the-character process, how much help do you expect from a director?
CE: I suppose it just depends on the director. Some directors are very good at creating a world, creating an atmosphere, the visual, and they expect the actors to arrive prepared to do what they do, and then do it. American Gangster was very much on that basis. Ridley created an extraordinary visual construct for the actors to work in. And apart from specific points where he thought things had gone a little awry, he would just let the actors he'd hired do what they were hired to do and capture the story within his context. Which was really exciting. Other directors are very involved. I actually find both sides very satisfying. It's great to be able to collaborate very strongly with a director on a character and what a character should do, and I love talking about it, implementing it, and experiencing it in many different ways. A lot of that is part of my theater experiences. But at the same time, I also relish the responsibility of just turning up, and the whole street looks like it's out of 1972. You walk on, and you're there to do the guy and fit into that world and exist within it.
AVC: Is there any type of director that you aren't comfortable with? Have you ever encountered a working method that just didn't work for you well as an actor?
CE: It's only when—and fortunately, I haven't experienced this very much, but I think I may in time—it's only when you're working with someone who's hands-on, but you've really different perspectives of what the character should be, or needs to be. And I've never had an extreme case of that, but I'd imagine that's when real problems start to happen. That's the only slight disadvantage of being a very involved director, is that you run the risk of the actor completely disagreeing with everything you're saying.
AVC: Where did David Mamet fall on that spectrum of controlling vs. loose with the actors?
CE: Well, he was very involved in the character, so he—I wouldn't say he was controlling, but he was very much part and parcel in every decision made regarding the character. It was sort of necessary, because the script—it needed to unravel so people could understand the character, so he could sort of sail smoothly through the story and an audience could go with him. I was aware that I needed to have David there in order to work through the details. It's the sort of film that if David wasn't the writer, we would have needed the writer on set as much as possible, because it was very complicated.
AVC: He's known for writing very mannered dialogue, and wanting it performed in one very precise way. And this film mostly moves away from that—it isn't the first film that doesn't have that speaking pattern, but it's on the far end of his signature style. Is he still very precise about how he wants you to read a specific line in a specific moment?
CE: No, he was quite free with the script, I thought. We would go through certain bits and I would occasionally want to change something, because it wouldn't sit right with me, or it didn't feel natural or something. Then we'd come to a way of doing that that still satisfied either what he wanted to do with the rhythm, or through the meaning that he wanted to get across. There was always a way of finding a compromise, or an alternative method that satisfied us both. And there aren't many of his kind of staccato beats—though some of them are there, and I always loved them, I love doing them. When I was working in theater, I became familiar with Dave Mamet's plays. I just found them all very exciting, Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo. You know, the sense of people overlapping and coming in over each other, the five different ways of saying "I." Just that sense of real life. But with a plot like this, you don't want to get too hung up on that. There's a lot going on, and you need to progress the story.
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