‘In order to succeed, I had to quit Britain’

David Oyelowo tells Horatia Harrod how his new chess film finds Hollywood learning to see the world in black and white

When David Oyelowo’s 12-year-old son found out that his father was going to be starring in a new Disney film he was, understandably, thrilled. “Oh, wow, Daddy!” he said, on hearing the news. “Are you going to be playing the best friend?”

“My son’s a big film buff, and we watch a lot of movies in our house,” says Oyelowo, who tells the story with deadpan irony. A few days earlier the 40-year-old actor, whose parents are Nigerian, gave an emotional speech about the failures of the British film industry to embrace diversity. “That’s what he expects, in terms of a filmic narrative, from someone who looks like his dad. You can only have expectations that match what you see, and clearly the films he’s seeing bear out what he was saying.”

There is something quietly subversive, then, about Queen of Katwe. It is based on the truelife story of Phiona Mutesi, an illiterate girl growing up in the Kampala township of Katwe, who, under the mentorship of a Christian outreach worker – played by Oyelowo – ends up representing her country at the international Chess Olympiad. While the basic outline might be familiar – the underdog grafter who makes good with the help of an inspirational teacher – the setting is not. “Chess. Uganda. A girl in a slum,” says Oyelowo, counting each down on his fingers. “These are not things that jump out at your average Hollywood executive and say, ‘That’ll make a Disney movie.’”

Queen of Katwe ended up being made because Mutesi’s story did resonate with someone in a position of influence in the Disney hierarchy: Tendo Nagenda, who’s been the company’s vice-president of production since 2010. “Because of his cultural upbringing, because he’d lived in Uganda, because of his parentage and because he wanted to see himself reflected on film,” says Oyelowo emphatically, “he walked that thing up and down the halls of Disney until it got made.”

The film was shot on location, with a director, Mira Nair, who has lived in Kampala, on and off, for nearly 30 years. “I knew we were going to be getting an insider’s perspective,” says Oyelowo, whose young co-stars were almost all non-professionals, plucked from the streets of Katwe. The film also features Kenyan actor Lupita Nyong’o, in her first non-CGI role since her Oscar-winning turn in 12 Years a Slave.

The last major film to be set in Uganda was Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland, in which, by chance, Oyelowo also appeared. It won an Oscar: Forest Whitaker, who played Idi Amin, the homicidal dictator who terrorised the country in the Seventies, took the prize for best actor in 2006. But there was criticism from some quarters that the story’s hero – as in Giles Foden’s original book – was an invented white character.

“I think it’s a brilliant film,” says Oyelowo, “but it does typify what I mean by the outsider’s point of view. The protagonist is the Scottish doctor. If you had read the original script, Forest Whitaker’s character

Taking control: with Rosamund Pike in A United Kingdom, which he produced