By 
It would be unfair to give sole credit for David Oyelowo’s career of some 60 films and television series, as well as a string of prestigious stage performances, to the girl he fancied from his local church growing up, but if it wasn’t for her he might never have become an actor.
“My pastor’s daughter who I was sort of obsessed with asked me out on what I thought was a date when I was about 15,” he says. “She took me to the National Theatre, but we went through a stage door and ended up in a room of young people warming up for a theatre workshop.” At the time, Oyelowo was a shy teenage boy trying to navigate a city from half-forgotten memories, having moved back to London after a period spent in his parent’s native Nigeria, but what he found on the other side of that stage door brought him out of his shell. The relationship was not meant to be – Oyelowo in fact ended up dating the girl’s sister, which he thinks she probably wasn’t pleased about – but his romance with acting began with that serendipitous misunderstanding.
I meet Oyelowo at the Chelsea townhouse where he is staying in early December, the Christmas lights of the well-heeled enclave twinkling festively. The 45-year-old actor is over from Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, the actress and producer Jessica Oyelowo, and their four children. He’s here to shoot the Apple TV adaptation of the YA book trilogy, Wool. The Oyelowos maintain a steadfast rule that they not be apart longer than two weeks, and Jessica can be heard quietly moving between the rooms above us while we sit and talk.
Their rule makes sense given the volume of work that Oyelowo has undertaken during his 20-year career, with barely a pause between the projects he has starred in, produced or directed. His acting CV includes working with Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan, on Lincoln and Interstellar respectively, and George Clooney and Angelina Jolie, on The Midnight Sky and Come Away. Most famously, perhaps, in Ava DuVernay’s 2014 drama Selma, Oyelowo gave a towering performance as Dr Martin Luther King. Of his many other notable screen roles, highlights include Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom, opposite Rosamund Pike, in which he played the Botswanan prince Sir Seretse Khama, who caused outcry when he married a white woman; and Mira Nair’s Queen of Katwe, in which he played the missionary Robert Katende, who taught Ugandan chess champion Phiona Mutesi to play the game. Oyelowo was awarded an OBE for services to drama in 2016. All of which the actor, whose considered baritone voice is at odds with his tendency to laugh at himself, seems to take in his stride.
It is fitting that we are speaking in such an elegant building given that arguably the lead character of Oyelowo’s forthcoming series is a grand and imposing house. In The Girl Before, a new psychological thriller from the BBC, he plays Edward, a mysterious architect who invites applicants to live in the house he has designed, provided they abide by his draconian rules.
Edward is a smooth-talking seducer, and Oyelowo enjoyed playing someone who is “equally attractive and repellent.” Even at this stage in his career he felt like it was a new kind of challenge.
Oyelowo grew up the eldest of three boys in Tufnell Park, north London. Their parents hoped to make a doctor, a lawyer and an engineer of them. “I got first dibs so I decided I was going to be the lawyer, but only because I was obsessed with Blair Underwood in L.A. Law,” he says. It took a while for him to realise that what he respected about Underwood was not his character’s legal prowess, but the performance he was watching unfold.
As it did on that auspicious day at the National Theatre, fate would intervene again when, on his gap year, Oyelowo bumped into his A-level theatre studies teacher on the Holloway Road. She convinced him to audition for drama school. He was awarded a scholarship at Lamda, but the real work was convincing his father to let him give up his place at university to join, “all these promiscuous people doing what? Being a jester?”
When he arrived he at first didn’t think much of the fact he was the only Black student, but it did seem to confirm some of what his parents feared. “They did not see much evidence of success for someone like me, either on television or in society,” he says. “To them it felt like a pipe dream.”
After graduating in 1998, Oyelowo decided he would avoid parts which felt defined by the colour of a character’s skin rather than the contents of his heart and head. He was prepared for this to mean that less work might come his way. Yet the success his parents feared wasn’t on the cards for him came fast. In 2001 he was cast in the title role in an RSC production of Henry VI Parts I, II and III, and then as an MI5 officer in the hugely successful BBC series Spooks. He wonders now if those early opportunities hadn’t come so quickly, whether he would have stood his ground, but the fact is that his decision to resist roles purely defined by his race has been vindicated. Oyelowo has been able to make a career playing men who are not only, or not always, or not at all defined by their Blackness (see: King Henry VI.)
“I always knew that I wanted a long career rather than a fast one,” he says. “I wanted to be part of the solution and not the problem when it came to representation on screen.
“When I get up in the morning,” he says, “my first thought is not that I'm a Black man. I've loved playing those roles like Seretse Khama or Robert Katende. They are rooted in race but there’s so much more going on from a human standpoint.”
Last year Oyelowo released his directorial debut, The Water Man, an adventure movie about a boy in search of a mythical creature he believes can save his dying mother. When he was a boy himself, Oyelowo loved adventure movies — ET, The Goonies, Stand By Me — but seldom if ever saw anyone who looked like him in them. “I think it has immense value to be able to see yourself on screen when you're young,” says Oyelowo. It is also important, he believes, for white kids to sometimes see people who don’t look like them on screen. In The Water Man the characters are Black, but they are not defined by their race. It is completely incidental, indeed irrelevant to the plot. Just as the whiteness of the family in ET is irrelevant.
Next Oyelowo will appear in See How They Run, a Fifties-set whodunnit, also starring Saoirse Ronan, Sam Rockwell and Adrien Brody. Then, through his own production company, Yoruba Saxon (which also made A United Kingdom), Oyelowo will release Solitary, about a wrongfully imprisoned man freed after seven years of solitary confinement, the making of which he says was as gruelling and uncomfortably close to reality as it sounds.
After that he will take on another real life giant in boxing legend Sugar Ray Robinson, whose flamboyant lifestyle outside the ring – cruising Harlem in a pink Cadillac, entourage in tow – was also infamous. If it is hard to draw a straight line between the roles he takes on or stories he chooses to tell it is perhaps because of his determination to remain unpredictable.
Perhaps the clearest marker of how well things are going for the Oyelowos is the news that David and Jessica will play themselves in an episode of the British remake of Call My Agent, the popular French series which sent up stars including Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Huppert. The couple’s storyline sees them lock horns after Jessica discovers that David is being paid significantly more than her for a film they are starring in. “It's sort of recognisable as what we have experienced being British and part of the industry, but it was also, selfishly, an opportunity to have some fun,” he says, smiling. “Jessica is really mean to me in it and after every take would lean in and whisper, ‘I'm so sorry.’”
They sound like quite the power couple, but as ever Oyelowo resists all attempts at categorisation, and defuses any false flattery with matter-of-fact modesty.
“Success for me,” he says, “is the fact that I've never had to do anything other than acting to keep my family with a roof over their heads and food on that table. I think with how competitive the entertainment industry is, that's what success looks like.”
‘The Girl Before’ premieres on 19 December on BBC One and iPlayer
