Chiwetel Ejiofor

“The inherited tradition is that we don't tell stories about slavery from the perspective of the slave. It's told through the president or the lawyer.”

“There's a catharsis in cutting down trees. But there's absolutely none of that in picking cotton. It's maddening! It's fiddly, and it pricks your fingers, and it's something that's a very hard skill if you have no alacrity for it.”

“I've always been a believer in research. It's great to have an instinctual human reaction to a character, too, of course, but it has to be countered with knowledge and understanding.”

“As a child, I was just never that interested in the lives of my favourite actors, like Cary Grant. I do wonder whether knowing too much about someone's personal life interrupts an audience's ability to suspend disbelief, to really invest in the characters. My preference would always be that people engage with the work.”

“You do as much research as you can for any project.”

“I was attracted to 'Half of a Yellow Sun' because of the story.”

“As an actor, you express certain things because they need to be expressed, and then you don't really feel a need to do it again. I want to feel something else, you know?”

“Normally, if you're lucky, the idea of a film you have in your head is more or less what you get back when you see it after the editing and the whole post-production process.”

“I am struck by how, walking down the street, I'm rarely made aware of my race, but that among journalists, race is absolutely massive.”

“It's hard to tell the story if you're not involved yourself, emotionally.”

“It's a weird thing when you spend your life trying to find these great scripts and great parts. You are reading scripts, you are traveling the world, you are hassling your agent. You are trying to find that script.”

“I'd never really considered film. If I'd thought about film more growing up, I probably would have changed my name. I had no concept of my name in lights.”

“I enjoyed being in California for a while. But that's the thing about London: you can't really shake it. I've always had the impression when I was in L.A. for long periods of time that simultaneously my life was happening somewhere else, and I'm missing it.”

“I think, as a younger actor, you are more open to the experience. And to an extent, you want to go into things blind and energised as if you were 15. Keep that terror.”

“We take it for granted sometimes that certain parts of our history are told, and we take it for granted that we know all that stuff, and we move forward along on that basis, but there are also massive gaps, and we have to try to address them.”

“I can run a good few miles. I box a little.”

“Different people approach the universe in different ways, but they also approach their own expectations in different ways.”

“I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.”

“I've always liked the idea of being a father. And I've always romanticised it, because I lost my father when I was young. In a way, all of the complications that come with my career are about that.”

“London and L.A. are both places I feel I can call home. It's a nice balance of Californian calm and that slightly more engaged, electric London vibe that I've always loved.”