David Oyelowo: ‘Like a lot of immigrants, my dad was all about work, work, work’

In his downtime, David Oyelowo enjoys watching mixed martial arts. There is something pure, he has said, about two people entering a cage and one exiting the winner. It’s a meritocracy he admires: brutal but fair. Suffice to say, his latest character – that of Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s most ruthless Roman warrior, a man who “moves like an engine” – would also be a fan.

At 48, Oyelowo looks not unlike an MMA fighter himself. Even in the knitted sweater and painter’s jacket he’s got on today, the actor seems substantial and sinewy. “I bulked up for practical reasons,” Oyelowo tells me, taking a seat in a backroom of the National Theatre. “It’s a very physically demanding role. Eight shows a week. It’s no joke. People may think it sounds lovely to be getting massages but if I didn’t, I’d be a walking ball of lactic acid.”

That athleticism is put to good use in Lyndsey Turner’s superb production of Coriolanus. For over two hours, Oyelowo prowls the stage, scarcely seeming to breathe. One of Shakespeare’s less-performed works, Coriolanus chronicles the demise of a war hero turned disgraced politician. It opens in the middle of an uprising and keeps up the ante from there. But it’s a ferocity that has been hard to shake come curtain call. “I haven’t played anyone whose state of being has entered my cells in quite the same way as this,” says Oyelowo, sending a ripple through his body in a bid to rid himself of it.

It’s a surprising statement coming from an actor who has spent much of his career fearlessly embodying very intense men – and winning Golden Globe and Emmy nominations as a result. Think of his Martin Luther King Jr in Ava DuVernay’s Selma. Or his Bass Reeves, a formerly enslaved man who went on to become one of America’s first Black deputy US marshals in Lawmen: Bass Reeves. Or the supermarket clerk descending into madness he played in 2014’s critically acclaimed film Nightingale. Even early on, as a precocious MI5 agent in BBC’s Spooks, he had an edge to him.

Ironically, it was after Spooks that he decided to leave England for good, in 2007. The homegrown hit had made Oyelowo, then in his twenties, a star. But his ascent was nowhere near as pronounced as that of his peers, such as Nicola Walker and Matthew Macfadyen. In fact, it seemed to stall altogether. He recalls thinking to himself: “Gosh, I know I’m working as hard as everyone else. I know that the reaction to my work is very good. The only thing I can see that is different is the colour of my skin – can’t change that. So what? What do I do?” He looked across the Atlantic for answers – where he saw actors like himself thriving. It’s no secret that Black British actors tend to find more opportunity in America: David Harewood, Nathalie Emmanuel, and Daniel Kaluuya have all attested to the same experience.

“It felt uncomfortably natural to gravitate that way,” Oyelowo sighs. “And I say uncomfortably because I liked living here. I liked being British. But I could either hope the industry changed or I could change my circumstances.” He’s never been the type to leave things up to fate.

Since the move, Oyelowo has lived with his “lovely” wife, the actor Jessica Oyelowo, and their four children in Los Angeles. America has been good to him, no doubt – but speaking to him now, I find it hard to believe he wouldn’t have chiselled away at the UK, made it yield to him in time.

“A tenet I live by is, ‘Excellence is the best weapon against prejudice’,” he says firmly. “What I do for a living is unfortunately subject to opinions, but there are levels of commitment that are undeniable, and for me personally, being who I am, where I’m from, and all of those things, it’s just the fact that there is a higher premium. I have found that to be absolutely true – but I don’t shy away from hard work, and I like pressure.”

Oyelowo attributes his tireless work ethic to his father, who moved the family over from Nigeria to a council flat in Islington, north London, where he worked as a minicab driver. “Like a lot of immigrants, he was all about work, work, work,” he says. “Having that modelled for me served me well in the early part of my career. Personally, I found I had to work very hard to get to a place that I felt was commensurate with what I hoped for myself. It wasn’t a given, shall we say.”

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His mother feels differently. When Oyelowo was born, she had a prophecy that her son would “walk with kings”. It all sounds quite Shakespearean, I tell him. “It’s definitely panned out that way, whether you look at the fact that I’ve played a few kings or I’ve found myself in a room with kings,” says Oyelowo, who has called King Charles a friend. It was thanks to the Prince’s Trust that Oyelowo was able to afford his fees at the National Youth Theatre in 1993. It was also there that he fell in love with his wife.

Certainly, there is something regal about Oyelowo, with his posture straight as a pin and his chest puffed out. His gaze, too, casts out on a slight incline. Then there are his answers: long and winding, delivered in a stately, transatlantic baritone.

“Whether consciously or subconsciously – most probably subconsciously – I am cognisant of carrying myself a certain way,” he says. “I have a very strong sense of self, and I do think that came through my parents; as a result, I’m unapologetic about that.”

Oyelowo stops short of calling his a “kingly disposition” – likely aware of how it sounds. But he maintains that a healthy dose of confidence is a good thing “especially in an industry that’s very apt to try to tell you where you are in the pecking order”. In the UK, too, “there is a cultural tendency towards diminishing oneself” that’s not particularly helpful in his line of work. Has he found that to be less of an issue in America? “One hundred per cent,” he says. “People are almost to the other extreme.”

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He has noticed a difference, too, in how the industry operates across the pond. “I think the British side of me is where the notion of craft comes from,” he says. “That we are not owed anything. When I was at drama school, you aspired to do theatre and be around great actors to become a great actor. In America, the focus a lot of the time is box office, fame… the superficial aspects are what get celebrated the most. It doesn’t mean there aren’t great actors there, but it’s less the focus. A combination of craft, self-possession and not being shy about success is not a bad mix.”

Over time, Oyelowo has found himself searching for something different in scripts. “Partly because there are things I have already done,” he says. “After playing Dr King, I was offered every civil rights leader under the sun.” But also because, these days, his priority is the director. “The deeper into my career I go, what I really want is the confidence to fall back into the hands of someone who is sure-footed about the story – which is not always the case,” he says. After Coriolanus, though, a comedy would be nice.

If there is one blemish on his CV, it’s The Help. The drama about a white woman writing a book about local Black maids in the 1960s was met with scrutiny on its 2011 release for sidelining Black characters and perpetuating a “white saviour” narrative. Viola Davis, who played one of the maids, publicly declared her regret over her role in the film. Oyelowo, whose part as a Southern Baptist preacher was minuscule in comparison, has no such qualms. As far as he is concerned, it was simply a rehearsal for his performance as Dr King. “Literally, The Help for me was a dry run,” he says. “So in that regard, no regrets! I’ll get paid to practise.”

It paid off: his turn in Selma was masterly – a credible portrayal replete with the requisite grace, dignity, and weariness. Though it took a while for the film to come to fruition at all. Oyelowo had watched four male directors come and go from the project before DuVernay stepped in. It was fascinating, he says, “to see just how much her perspective reshaped the film; my interaction as Dr King with Coretta Scott King, in the script that existed before Ava came along, was three phone calls”. In DuVernay’s vision, their relationship was central to the story.

“What I’ve found with women – which is a bit of a generalisation, but it is specific to my experience – is that they gravitate towards the emotional topography of a story and a character way quicker than men in film do,” says Oyelowo, who has worked with several female directors over his career – including Turner, on current project Coriolanus. “I have selfishly been a huge beneficiary of that, as I’m afforded more emotionally layered performances as a result of the women I’ve worked with.”

Oyelowo became an American citizen around the time of Selma. “It was a very conscious decision,” he says. “I couldn’t be going around doing press for a film about voting rights when I can’t even vote in the society I live in.” He was eventually granted citizenship in 2016, a year after the film’s release. How is he feeling about the election? “Very nervous,” he says. “Very, very nervous.”

More than anything, Oyelowo wants, “as a father, to be able to point to the leaders of the nation in which I live and say: that is a disposition that a leader should have. And also try to get back to a rhetoric that isn’t so wilfully divisive all the time.” Personally, he believes, Kamala Harris “will put a whole bunch of necessitous fire-hosing on the heat. I’m not saying that America wouldn’t remain volatile, racially, politically, financially, and so on, but the rhetoric… there is a dearth of civility that is very hard to live with right now.”

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They had been in rehearsals for Coriolanus when Joe Biden bowed out of the race and Harris stepped in. “Watching that happen, the thing that was being talked about instantaneously was not her policies. It was her,” says Oyelowo. “Is she presidential? Is she beautiful? What does she represent? What is her personality? Do I like her? She’s more likeable than Hillary… all that stuff. It had nothing to do with her credentials for being the president of the United States. It was all optics.” He sees a similarity with Coriolanus: “That cult of personality over the necessity of policy is a really interesting thing.”

Whatever happens, Oyelowo has his faith to fall back on. On a daily basis, he hears God in a palpable, tangible way. “God gave me every one of my children’s names,” says Oyelowo. “I will never forget the day when he told me I was going to have a daughter called Zoe. I was like, whoa, hold the phone. You know, we had three sons by then, we were done. The money wasn’t rolling in. That was how I knew it was from God because of how unsettled I was by it.” Their daughter, Zoe, was born in 2012.

There have been wobbly moments, such as when he and his wife suffered a number of miscarriages. “That really battered my faith. One of them was later on in the pregnancy and that was hard,” he says. “But even through that, the guiding hand, the love, the hedge of protection, the grace… it’s so palpable in my life.” He pauses and lowers his gaze a moment. “I love being an actor, but faith? Faith is the bedrock of everything that I do.”

‘Coriolanus’ is at the National Theatre until 9 November; tickets available at nationaltheatre.org