WAMG Interview: David Oyelowo – Star of SELMA and CAPTIVE

At the age of 24, David Oyelowo brought his regal bearing to the stage, where he became the first black actor to portray King Henry VI in The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2001 productions of Shakespeare’s trilogy of plays about the king. More recently, he has made a name for himself by taking on American film roles. He played Martin Luther King Jr. in the Oscar-nominated film SELMA, a civil rights activist in THE BUTLER, a villain in RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, and a member of the Tuskeegee Airmen in RED TAILS.

In his most recent film CAPTIVE, Oyelowo shows his range by taking on another true life character. Brian Nichols is known for his escape and killing spree in the Atlanta, Georgia area in 2005. CAPTIVE is a thrilling drama about the spiritual collision of two broken lives. When Brian Nichols took recovering meth addict Ashley Smith (played in the film by Kate Mara) hostage in her own apartment, she turned for guidance to Rick Warren’s inspirational best-seller, The Purpose Driven Life, sharing the book with the desperate killer.

David Oyelowo was in town promoting CAPTIVE and We Are Movie Geeks sat down and asked him some questions about his career, his new film, and his religious faith.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman September 3rd, 2015

We Are Movie Geeks: Did you have any second thoughts about playing Brian Nichols?   

David Oyelowo: I did because I know what it costs me to play these roles. You can’t phone that in. My job is an actor is to fully inhabit the character and when I say that cost, it’s that a character like Brian Nichols, unlike Dr. King, someone I hugely admire and was honored to get to play him, did not have the same draw for obvious reasons. But my job was the same in that the job of an actor is to not judge the character. You have to understand what they do and why they’re doing it so you have to function as a three-dimensional human being that people can’t believe.

WAMG: Were you able to meet Brian Nichols? 

DO: No, the nature of his prison sentence means that he cannot have access. But I did meet his mother and that was very intense, as you can imagine. The interesting thing about meeting her was that, even 10 years on, she can’t believe that this is her life and that that was her son. It’s still reverberating for that family.

WAMG: Was there much footage of Brian Nichols for you to study?

DO: Yes, of the trial mainly, not beforehand. My primary source for getting under the skin of Brian was Ashley really. She remembered this event as if it had happened yesterday and she was on set with us quite a lot of the shoot.

WAMG: Did she have much influence on the shoot? Did she make any changes?   

DO: She had influence. Not from a creative point of view but more from a factual point of view. I was very keen, because I could not speak to Brian, to make sure that what we were doing felt true, like it was authentic to the experience. It was one of those stories where there is no need to embellish anything. Literally it played like a movie. When you think about the fact that Brian Nichols killed those people, then it was a 45 minute drive to Duluth to go to this apartment complex, and he found his way specifically into her apartment, you couldn’t write to that. So for us it was about sticking to the true story and that was primarily her function for us while we were shooting the film.

WAMG: Do you think your job is an actor with a role like this is to instill sympathy? Brian is introduced killing three people in cold blood, so the sympathy level starts out at zero. Were you trying to raise that sympathy with the audience?

DO: One of the toughest things for me was to make sure that not in any way was this supposed to feel like an exoneration of what he did on that day, but the fact remains that the during those hours, Ashley Smith attributes him with part of why she gained her life back. When he held a gun to her head and told her to take the meth, a drug that she had been a slave to for so long, and she said no, the way she describes it is that she felt God Took over Brian Nichols and said “Do you want to live or do you want to die?, turn away from this thing and take hold of life.” So, regardless of if you’re coming from a faith point of view or not, something miraculous happened here. Something that on paper shouldn’t have. That is something that can only happen, I think, when a degree of humanity is shed between these two people. So yes, the idea at the beginning of the movie is to have him be cold blooded and one of the things that I really struggled with was that you have a guy with no shirt on, a very muscular man, with two guns running around Atlanta. This is the kind of guy we normally think of as an action hero in movies, so the toughest thing was how to make him not seem like Jason Statham them or Jason Bourne. I wouldn’t want to see him as a human being, especially if he did what he did to someone in my family. So my job is to imbue him with a degree of humanity and take a look at these two people. Ashley Smith was a drug addict who had lost custody of her daughter. Her husband had died in a drug-related incident. She was someone you could discard to the scrapheap, But seeing these two broken people together making choices that took them away from the deadly path that they were both on – that can only be born out of humanity.

WAMG: Were you familiar with The Purpose-Drive Life before you got involved in this project? 

DO: Yes, I had read it before I knew about this incident and it’d been a very meaningful book to me personally as a Christian. The thing I got for from it is that God’s purpose for my life is way bigger than my purpose for my own life. And that is an extraordinary thing, especially for a pretty ambitious guy like me. And I think that applies here especially for Ashley Smith. She had watched the news that day and had seen this guy running around Atlanta and then at 2 o’clock in the morning, he’s in her apartment. When he broke in she thought this was God’s way of telling her that she deserved death.

WAMG: In The Purpose-Drive Life author Rick Waren says that the great tragedy is not death but life without purpose. Ashley Smith escaped death, so that applies to her. Brian Nichols escaped death too by the jury not giving him the death penalty, so what do you think his purpose is? 

DO: I’m a believer in life beyond this life and I think that his purpose is to embrace the fact that he has run out of credit here on earth, but beyond this life there is hope for him. I believe that God is a redemptive God. A God of forgiveness. Ashley was stopped in her journey just before it was the point of no return. But here we are talking about a movie based on her life. That is purpose that came out of that very dark situation. She regained custody of her daughter. She remarried and had a couple of more children. She is now a spokeswoman for Celebrate Recovery. She’s helping people recover from the same addictions that she had. Of course it’s more difficult to find the purpose about what Brian did but at the end of the day, she somehow stopped him in his tracks. Here’s a white woman who understandably should’ve been terrified of this big black guy that broke into her apartment. She made him pancakes. She read a book to him. I was with Brian’s mother when she thanked Ashley for making pancakes for her son which is an extraordinary thing for a mother to say but only a mother would say that. So I think there’s purpose in all of that really.

WAMG: You’re very open about your Christian faith which is kind of rare in Hollywood. Do you ever find that that is an impediment in getting roles? Do you worry about that, or do you care?   

DO: I don’t worry about that because I think the only time you should worry is if you are inauthentic. I like to think that the life I lead chimes with the choices I make and who I am. If that’s the case, ultimately people can’t discredit you. I think if you go up and get awards and thank the Lord when you’re doing it, and the next moment you’re getting a DUI, then I think that’s when it’s just intolerable. I try to be authentic in terms of what I do and who I am and ultimately I try to let the work do the talking. I haven’t found it to be something that people resist. I’m sure there are people that know that I’m a person of faith and that may make them feel like they don’t want to work with me and that’s fine as well. There are plenty of people that do.

CAPTIVE opens nationally September 18th. Look for a review here at We Are Movie Geeks.