Chiwetel Ejiofor: ‘Education is the most important thing we have’

I was quiet and shy, but as a teenager I was very excited because I was starting to work with the National Youth Theatre. So at 16 I had done my first play with them, which was Julius Caesar – and I played Julius Caesar. Quite a nice way to begin! That was the beginning of acting feeling like a real possibility and understanding that people did this for their actual work.

It was one of those great youthful summers. The Youth Theatre took over these halls of residence in Tufnell Park [in north London], so
there were parties all the time and a raucous lifestyle that I was newly involved in. There was a sense of youthful exuberance and optimism. But underneath that I was really falling in love with this idea of being an actor.

I was all about theatre acting but was developing a real love, on the sly, for American films of the Seventies and early Eighties. I was starting to watch films like Raging Bull, trying to understand what De Niro was doing, seeing these extraordinary performances and how he was pushing things in a completely new direction. I was thinking about whether that had any relationship to what I was doing.

I could have given my younger self less of a hard time. Everything felt so monumental and so important. I had a tendency to put so much pressure on myself, as if every moment could be the one that burst the bubble of this dream. Any criticism was a crushing blow. There was a sensitivity and edginess and terror of it not happening that I was carrying. Maybe you need a little bit of that, but I could have taken it down a bit. I was carrying a lot of stress.

My father was a doctor but also a musician. So there was an element of performing in my family with him playing on stage and the videos for his music. Not that I put that together at the time. My engagement was so much more with the literature. I was so excited about understanding that sort of self-exploration.

I felt like I had discovered Shakespeare. At 13 or 14 I was going around telling everybody, “You have got to read this guy, he really gets it.” They were like, “Yeah, he is a fairly well-known writer!” I remember being surprised by how clearly this person from hundreds of years ago was talking about an experience and a personal, private feeling that I hadn’t really expressed to anybody. It was Henry IV Part I and I felt he was really speaking to an angst that I recognised and an anxiety about what the future would hold.

Being able to express emotions and feelings is an important part of the grieving process. And it is an important part of recovery in grieving [Ejiofor was in a car accident in Nigeria in 1988 in which his father was killed]. We are social and we want to communicate the feelings that we have. I felt very released when I started doing plays in a way I didn’t realise I needed. I would suddenly feel free to express myself in ways that I couldn’t in ordinary life… and then people would applaud at the end. Oh wow! It was overwhelmingly powerful.

I feel we can empower young people – we are all the result of empowered young people,

Teenage me wrestled with a lot. It is amazing to me that almost everything I am now is dependent on this young teenager. He made these decisions that then affected me as an adult in profound ways. But if I saw myself as a teenager, I would probably say, “You are far too young to be making these decisions.” He was a young kid, but he did well. I feel we can empower young people – we are all the result of empowered young people.

Life takes you on these extraordinary journeys. My younger self would not be able to conceive of the world that has opened to me. My first film, Amistad, was in LA and it was a Spielberg film. So just a few years from when we are talking about, my expectations were completely blown out of the water. I gained the understanding that an artistic life, a life in the arts, can be a deeply unpredictable life and an unpredictable lifestyle. It can have these extraordinary highs and lows.

Working with Steve McQueen on 12 Years a Slave was a huge moment for me. And an extraordinarily engaging time to tell Solomon Northup’s story. It felt like a big moment for cinema and a big moment generally. I was so deeply engaged in it, and admired Steve and what he brought to that film and the story he told. It was amazing. That was a great highlight for me. Filming Dirty Pretty Things with Stephen Frears was another real breakthrough and the first time I fell in love with film acting.