Shortly before actor David Oyelowo began shooting the part of Martin Luther King Jr in the new historical drama Selma, he set out on a video-hunting mission.
Oyelowo was searching for something that would help him get under the skin of his subject — that would go beyond the polished statue of photo ops and speech clips — when the longtime King ally Andrew Young handed him a piece of unseen footage.
In it, the civil rights leader could be viewed letting his guard down with friends and allies as they toured for their campaign of economic equality; the candid material, it turns out, was shot just weeks before King was gunned down.
“When Dr King was being interviewed by the press, there was a certain demeanour, a dignified presence, he felt the need to project,” said the Nigerian-British Oyelowo. “But with this, he was just there, not putting on any of that — eating fried chicken, belching, laughing with his friends, being the prankster, the guy’s guy. And that was huge for me. It was finally a chance to see the man behind the iconography.”
Landing like a firework in the midst of nationwide protests over the shooting of several unarmed black men, Selma eschews the cradle-to-grave conventions of a biopic in favour of something more fresh and specific.
Director Ava DuVernay’s film, which is up for best picture and best original song at this year’s Oscars — centres on three critical, sometimes-bloody months in 1965 when King and Southern Christian Leadership Conference leaders sought to organise the Selma-to-Montgomery march in segregated Alabama. In focusing tightly on King’s approach — which involved drawing attention to the cause with media-friendly incidents that, he hoped, would galvanise President Johnson to press for the Voting Rights Act — Selma examines the strategies as much as the speeches.
In so doing, the film etches a King who’s engaging in monumental work without treating him like a monument. For the first major film ever to feature King as a lead character, moviegoers get a different civil rights leader than they might be familiar with. Oyelowo plays the man with a wide range of modes. He has an oratorical gravitas in key sermons, yes, but also a quiet defeatism when confronted by his wife about infidelity and a scrappy fighting spirit in backroom church planning sessions.
And, it should be noted, they get a different kind of actor through which to see him. The 38-year-old Oyelowo (the name is pronounced as it’s spelled, which doesn’t make it any easier to say) is a performer with outspoken views on race and Hollywood; a debonair Oxford-born Brit far from the Atlanta-raised pastor he’s bringing to life; and a man with a strong Christian bent.
On a recent morning, Oyelowo was in a hotel restaurant here, the latest stop on a tour that has him crisscrossing the country not unlike his real-life subject. If the putative reason is holiday film promotion, the cause is more serious. It is a chance to stand up at word-of-mouth screenings and talk about the injustice and nonviolent responses of a half-century ago as a similar drama plays outside the theatres.
Demystification
“We wrapped the second of July, and Michael Brown was killed on the ninth of August,” Oyelowo said. “I’m at one screening and I’m standing there 30 minutes after the verdict that Darren Wilson wasn’t going to be indicted in Ferguson. People watching this film think we made it after Ferguson. King was cut down because they knew what impact his message would have and how it would completely change this country, and here we are with this movie able to talk his strategy of love in the face of hate.”
Oyelowo said to convey that message he sought to pull back the curtain, a kind of inspiration through demystification.
“What’s this guy like at home with his wife and kids?” Oyelowo said. “He’s not talking in a vibrato about taking out the trash. Where are his doubts, his guilt, his need to walk away? Those are the reasons to do a film about Dr King. Because otherwise, there is documentary footage and books. You don’t need this movie.”
At the same time, Oyelowo said, he wanted to avoid the tics of fact-based acting, in which mannerisms and other physical manifestations can stand in for more subtle performance skills. “What I tried to do was embody, not do an impersonation or an impression.”
That approach seemed to work for those who can judge it best — the people who knew and studied King. When the long-serving Congressman John Lewis, one of the so-called Big Six Civil Rights leaders who was instrumental in Selma, came to the film’s Atlanta set one day, he sat in the back of a church and found himself conflating a real past with a constructed present.
King, he believed, was preaching in front of him. “When they stopped filming, I walked up to David and hugged him, and we both started crying,” Lewis said. “Everyone around us thought we lost our mind.”
DuVernay said she would find herself doing double-takes in the edit room.
“I would look at some of the stuff he was doing, and there didn’t seem to be a shred of David in it except his body, and even that changed,” she said, alluding to the weight the actor added and movements that more closely resembled King’s.
Martin Luther King III, who bears a resemblance to his father, offered the most potent endorsement. “He was able to capture the essence of my dad.”
‘Dangerous game’
Whether that means Oyelowo will be embraced by audiences is another matter. Playing an icon can be a dangerous game: You have the benefits of filmgoers coming in with a built-in sense of reverence, but you also have to live up to a fixed idea in their minds (or worse, run the risk of seeming like you’re trying too hard to replicate it).
Oyelowo will at least have the benefit of few preconceptions.
The actor, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and four children, has had plenty of work that may not have registered as James Franco’s boss in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, as Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey’s son in Lee Daniels’ The Butler. This season he’s also a complicated prosecutor in J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year and can be seen in an early scene in Interstellar explaining to Matthew McConaughey that space exploration was a Cold War myth.
Oyelowo first read Paul Webb’s Selma script in 2007. The movie took a wide path to the screen; despite producers who included Brad Pitt and eventually Winfrey, versions with Steven Spielberg, Paul Greengrass and Lee Daniels all failed to get off the ground, until Oyelowo helped bring on DuVernay last year. The film was financed independently via the French sales company Pathe; Paramount came aboard later to distribute it.
The film is not officially endorsed by the King family, though members have been supportive (speeches were written by the filmmakers and not licensed from the King archives). And despite being virtually unknown in 2007, Oyelowo, a devout Christian who will often pray on sets, said he heard a voice tell him that he would play the role.
“I knew that voice, because it was the same voice that told me to marry my wife, the same voice that told me to give names to my children before they were even conceived,” he recalled. “It’s what kept me going even though directors at the time didn’t want me.”
When he was headed to audition for Daniels at the Chateau Marmont several years ago, the voice made itself audible again.
“I heard …‘Don’t have your bag on your shoulder but on your side, because that’s how Dr King would have it.’” When Oyelowo walked into the room, he recalled, Daniels remarked that he thought King had entered.
The actor’s strong beliefs and outspoken manner are manifest in other ways.
At a small dinner thrown by Paramount in October, Oyelowo, talking about the struggles of minorities in the movie business, described that he felt black actors needed to band together more, saying that “Jewish Hollywood wouldn’t be what it is without a certain amount of nepotism.”
He took a more circumspect approach when asked about the comment in the recent conversation. “The truth of the matter is we want to see ourselves in movies,” he said. “I guess what I was alluding to is that if we have enough people who have a power base, then we don’t need to wait for our story being done. And a power base comes from a unified front. Nothing feels more quintessentially Hollywood than seeing George Clooney and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on the red carpet and they’re all working on each other’s movies.”
He continued, “I think we’ve been sold a lie that there can only be ‘one,’ that the question with any black actor is ‘is he the next Denzel?’ Zac Efron isn’t subjected to that. Channing Tatum isn’t subjected to that. And if [a black actor] makes the mistake of buying into it, he can be isolated and picked off.”
The issue, he added, is a quality of parts in addition to a quantity of performers. “It needs to be more than just roles like Martin Luther King, more than just roles we get to play because Ryan Gosling literally can’t play them.”
He paused and gave a small laugh. “What I’m saying is we need to steal a few from Ryan Gosling.”
