David Oyelowo’s brave new world

‘Selma’ actor says he wants to change preconceptions about black people in cinema

Six months before he floored audiences with his thrilling portrait of the Rev Martin Luther King Jr in Selma, David Oyelowo had another movie, Nightingale, premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival. It’s all Oyelowo, a one-man show about an Army veteran fighting a losing battle with the voices in his head.

HBO picked up the film after Plan B, the production company run by Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner that co-financed Selma, signed on as a partner. It turned out to be a memorable reunion, as Oyelowo recently said.

What were your expectations for

Nightingale after it premiered last year at the Los Angeles Film Festival?

At best, an interesting distributor picks it up, it plays for a couple of weeks, max, in New York and LA and ends up streaming somewhere. And every now and then, somebody stumbles upon it and gets something from it.

The subject matter is pretty audacious.

Movies don’t get made about those guys. And certainly not me playing those guys. That’s why I jumped on it. It was not written for an African American character. It feeds into my bigger mission, which is to show the world as it actually is as opposed to how it’s perceived to be in cinema and on the news. It was an artistic endeavour, yes, but it was also about the power of the image.

I heard a story about your son asking if you were “playing the main character’s friend” in your upcoming movie about a Ugandan chess prodigy.

That was a powerful question. It’s an indictment on what he sees day in and day out in movies. He’s an avid movie watcher, and even with me having just played Martin Luther King in Selma ,he still felt the need to ask that question. Images matter. And he’s not seeing them.

And images are political. So for a time, I have an opportunity to be part of shifting some of those paradigms. That question from my son was a big eye-opener for me about how necessary it is, not only for my children but just society in general. My ambition is to see stories that otherwise wouldn’t be told and characters that are often seen as peripheral in mainstream Hollywood take centre stage. And that, for me, is primarily black people.

Lee Daniels, whom you worked with on The Butler and The

Paperboy, is making it work with Empire.

The success of Empire is indicative of a lie that has been told for years, that nobody would watch a black family on a mainstream network show. It’s the same preconceptions we battled with The Butler, when they told us the movie wouldn’t travel. That film ended up making nearly $200 million (Dh734.5 million) worldwide. These are lies upheld by people who want to perpetuate a certain mythology because it serves their own agenda, which is them wanting to see themselves in movies.

The pushback against Selma was remarkable in that regard. That started when [director Ava