UNITED KINGDOM: '12 Years a Slave' star Chiwetel Ejiofor says being able to play the role of Solomon Northrup, was incredibly enriching and rewarding as the Oscar-tipped film holds its European premiere in London

Record ID: 221171

  • Title: UNITED KINGDOM: '12 Years a Slave' star Chiwetel Ejiofor says being able to play the role of Solomon Northrup, was incredibly enriching and rewarding as the Oscar-tipped film holds its European premiere in London
  • Date: 19th October 2013
  • Summary: LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM (OCTOBER 18, 2013) (REUTERS) EJIOFOR BEING INTERVIEWED (SOUNDBITE) (English) ACTOR, CHIWETEL EJIOFOR, SAYING: "The book is really useful because it's a first hand personal narrative, so you can be quite deep inside the experience and you're really communicating with Solomon, or attempting to connect with him. And then after that you've got
  • Embargoed: 3rd November 2013 12:00
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  • Location: United Kingdom
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Reuters ID: LVA70Y4KWKVLX010WGKQQ87G1S4C
  • Story Text: As the film festival season draws down, eyes in the entertainment world are beginning to turn to awards season, and many are tipping "12 Years a Slave", hosting it's European premiere in London on Friday (October 18), as a front runner.
    The story of a free black man and musician in New York, Solomon Northup, who was tricked and sold into slavery in 1841 and sent to Louisiana plantations for 12 years, has critics lauding as an all-star cast retell the story penned by Northup as a memoir in 1853.
    Speaking on the red carpet, Chiwetel Ejiofor - who plays the lead role of Northrup - said being able to connect with the role through the memoirs was an intense experience.

    "The book is really useful because it's a first hand personal narrative, so you can be quite deep inside the experience and you're really communicating with Solomon, or attempting to connect with him," he told Reuters TV.

    "After that you've got to, you've just got to trust it, and you've got to go down the rabbit hole and see what's there, and just be open to the experience and all that it brings, and it was incredibly rewarding and enriching as an experience to walk in any way, in any way in that man's shoes," he said.
    Steered by British director Steve McQueen, whose previous credits include sex-addiction epic "Shame" and the Northern Ireland prison movie "Hunger", "12 Years a Slave" relies heavily on the quality of the acting - often communicating a great deal through the expressions of the characters alone.
    McQueen said it was a natural way to approach such a powerful story.

    "Life, often, is without words," he said on the red carpet.

    "It's all about how you communicate to the audience, and that's what I was interested in," he added.
    I mean Solomon as a figure is a very solitudinal figure, and it's all about what he's thinking and how he's reacting, and the audience connecting with him - him being dragged into this sort of bizarre, surreal world of slavery," McQueen told Reuters TV.

    "12 Years a Slave" has been heralded as an emotional and realistic journey through slavery in pre-Civil War America and won the top award at the Toronto Film Festival - often a harbinger of the film awards season.
    The film itself may well be a defining one for Ejiofor, a British actor of Nigerian origin in the biggest film role of his career, one that many critics believe will yield him a best actor Oscar nomination.
    It is also a role he said he wasn't quite sure he was up for.

    "I really felt the responsibility of telling that story and the wider story of slavery but also telling the story of a specific man who went through these incredible 12 years and the responsibility to him, to his descendants and so on," he said.

    "So it definitely took me a moment of going back to the book and kind of trying to figure it out before I could sort of come on board," Ejiofor added.

    "You wait your entire life for a script and a part like this and your first instinct is 'I don't know, can I do it, am I good enough to do it, is it for me?' you know?" he said.
    Ejiofor got his first big break in film in 1996 from Steven Spielberg, who cast him in the slave ship tale "Amistad," but has since split his time between film, television and the stage in Britain, where he has won awards for performances like his title role in "Othello."
    McQueen, for his part, said that despite the sensitive nature of the subject, there was no added pressure on producing the film - beyond doing its story and its narrator justice.

    "No pressure other than the truth. That's it, you know, you're responsible for something and you want to get it right," McQueen said.

    "That's all, and I embrace that responsibility. I want that responsibility," he added.
    Solomon learns to keep quiet about his education and his condition as a former free man, lest he be seen as a threat to masters.
    He watches with disbelief the separation of mothers and children in the selling of slaves.
    And for years he tries to protect a young slave from the whippings, rape and psychological torture at the hands of their evil master, played by Michael Fassbender, who is tortured himself by his love for the girl.
    With Benedict Cumberbatch and Brad Pitt helping bolster an already stellar cast, the awards buzz that has been whipped up around "12 Years a Slave" is palpable.
    But Ejiofor said he was just happy that the film came to fruition and that people have taken a strong interest in it.

    "I'm thrilled with the film, I'm excited about the film, I'm really excited to open it," he said.

    "I'm deeply, deeply proud of it and, in a way, it's been so remarkable anyway that anything else would be, is extraordinary, but I'm just really happy to be here I think," he told Reuters TV.

    "12 Years a Slave" opens in the UK on January 24.
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