“If you look at the films made before and after 12 Years you’ll see the difference,” Steve McQueen, that film’s director and a friend of Ejiofor, tells me. “The film changed the industry and Chiwetel was a huge part of that. The fact that a film about slavery with a Black lead and supporting actors had critical success and made money in the U.S. and globally made it possible for more diverse films with Black stories to be made.
“I will never forget someone in the industry telling me that films with Black leads don’t sell internationally,” adds McQueen. “Chiwetel helped to change that misconception.”
“Historically, we’ve watched from a distance stories set during the enslavement of Africans in the Americas,” Woodard tells me by email. “But Chiwetel’s patient unfolding of the free man Solomon Northup’s slide into bondage allows no such safety. Instead, we are forced to take that descent, experiencing the terror and ultimately the ‘triumph’, with him.”
Ejiofor is himself now enmeshed in the Marvel universe, returning in Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness (in cinemas on 5 May). Once upon a time, Ejiofor – Shakespeare purist, dramatic force – might have seemed an odd fit for the MCU. But he was into comics as a kid: “All the Alan Moore stuff, Watchmen and 2000AD, when it was always quite niche and nerdy, so it’s been fascinating to see the expansion of that,” he says.
Despite also loving theatre as a kid, Ejiofor never had any concept of combining the two, nor the world of interconnected, multi-platform mega-franchises and straight-to-streaming spin-offs. “The theatre was my universe when I fell in love with acting and even film and TV seemed so removed from where I was at,” he says. “I wouldn’t have even been able to imagine the world as it is now.”
There is little that we know about Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Ejiofor is resistant to spoilers). For many fans, the most promising factor is the return of horror maestro Sam Raimi, whose original Spider-Man trilogy laid the groundwork for today’s comic book franchises.
“Sam is embedded in the lore and creation of this genre,” says Ejiofor. “As I think Scott [Derrickson, director of the first Doctor Strange] said, it was really exciting that Sam was coming in as a legendary figure in his own right and it felt like such a strong match for Doctor Strange’s own mercurial energy. There’s something very layered about the work that Sam does. It’s deep but he always maintains this kind of mystery and slightly magical quality that sits perfectly within this film.”
I ask him how he feels about the spoiler culture that swirls around every Marvel project. He smiles. “It seems so perverse to me,” his smile broadens. “I never understand why people want to spoil a movie, or why you would want to engage with it, which will inevitably spoil your entertainment of the film. It speaks to the impatience in us I think.”
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