Quotes by Chiwetel Ejiofor

About Chiwetel Ejiofor:

Chiwetelu Umeadi is a British actor, director, and writer. After enrolling at the National Youth Theatre in 1995, and gaining a scholarship to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, at age 19 and three months into his course, Ejiofor was cast by Steven Spielberg to play a supporting part in the film Amistad as James Covey.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I love the theater community and theater life, and would love to figure out the distinctive differences between Broadway and the West End.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

As a child, I was just never that interested in the lives of my favourite actors, like Cary Grant. I do wonder whether knowing too much about someone's personal life interrupts an audience's ability to suspend disbelief, to really invest in the chara...

Chiwetel Ejiofor

I enjoyed being in California for a while. But that's the thing about London: you can't really shake it. I've always had the impression when I was in L.A. for long periods of time that simultaneously my life was happening somewhere else, and I'm miss...

Chiwetel Ejiofor

I still have to say that I did 'Dirty Pretty Things' 11 years ago. That was a very sudden shift in my life and my relationship to my work, and it didn't feel it was impossible to make a film like that.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

It's hard to maintain a life when you do a play. You feel you have to pretend to go through a normal day, knowing that in the evening you'll be doing this.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

It's a strange thing, but you get this click in your brain; the wonderful feeling that the entirety of a character is suddenly available and accessible to you.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

I was the classic middle child in some ways, the one who could have been a priest in an alternate universe.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

Friends at school were always quite shocked that we holidayed in Nigeria, but it was all pretty middle-class, really.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

The inherited tradition is that we don't tell stories about slavery from the perspective of the slave. It's told through the president or the lawyer.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't ha...

Chiwetel Ejiofor

If you're looking at people like Patrice Lumumba, you are looking at people who had a very definite plan, and events overran them.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

There's a catharsis in cutting down trees. But there's absolutely none of that in picking cotton. It's maddening! It's fiddly, and it pricks your fingers, and it's something that's a very hard skill if you have no alacrity for it.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

I am struck by how, walking down the street, I'm rarely made aware of my race, but that among journalists, race is absolutely massive.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

I was attracted to 'Half of a Yellow Sun' because of the story.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

It's hard to tell the story if you're not involved yourself, emotionally.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

Different people approach the universe in different ways, but they also approach their own expectations in different ways.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

When I first had my eyebrows waxed, I was pretty disturbed.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

I enjoy doing everything, comedy and drama. I just look for the characters really and what they offer.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

In England, there's no acknowledgement the invention of slavery came from Britain.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

I wouldn't be the same actor if I couldn't do theater.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

Author Bio

  • NameChiwetel Ejiofor
  • DescriptionBritish actor
  • BornJuly 10, 1974
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionActor
  • AwardsLaurence Olivier Award; Indiana Film Journalists Association Award For Best Actor; Officer Of The Order Of The British Empire