Chiwetel Ejiofor

Date of Birth 10 July 1977, Forest Gate, London, England, UK
Height 5′ 10″ (1.78 m)

I remember getting cast in Amistad and getting this very strong feeling that I had overshot myself. It was a great shock. It made me realize that this is not a profession you can predict; that you can have all these ambitions and expectations and that they can all be thrown to the wind. What was peculiar about that situation was that my aspirations were so far below what actually happened.

I like to disappear into a role. I equate the success of it with a feeling of being chemically changed.

I always thought of the play as a sequel to Romeo and Juliet. I think Shakespeare’s so astute in his understanding of people being vulnerable, you know. And that love is so easy to corrupt. I think so many of Shakespeare’s plays are about how fragile love is – how perfect and beautiful it is, but also how terrifying and easy to manipulate it is.

But these are the realities of the artistic idealism and the stock, the commercial/financial realism, and, so, somehow sometimes it is going to work in your favor and sometimes against, and that’s all part and parcel of it. We just, in our end, just carry on trying to sort of produce the work, or the best work we can do, and hope that at their end they find a way of getting that to as many people as possible in the cinema medium.