Gringo's David Oyelowo interview: 'I do have a silly side, and I was definitely looking for something a bit lighter'

The British actor, who received a Golden Globe nomination for his role as Dr Martin Luther King in 2014’s ‘Selma’, makes his first real comic outing in ‘Gringo’, a fast-paced comedy thriller co-starring Charlize Theron and Joel Edgerton

Broader horizons: ‘I don’t need to be in every civil rights movie being made’ (Getty)

“Someone once said to me the greatest power an actor has is the word ‘no’,” says David Oyelowo. Now 41, the handsome, articulate British-born actor who made his name – and received a Golden Globe nomination – for his role as Dr Martin Luther King in 2014’s Selma, has been saying ‘no’ a lot since then. “As wonderful as it was to play Dr King, I don’t need to be in every civil rights movie being made. I’ve consciously stayed away from those.”

That’s no mean feat, given how good Oyelowo was in Selma, but he’s gradually managing to crack both Hollywood and all manner of genres. This year, he’s already popped up in the JJ Abrams-produced sci-fi The Cloverfield Paradox, a film that was dropped on Netflix just hours after it was first advertised during the Super Bowl. Now he’s the lead in Gringo, a fast-paced comedy thriller co-starring Charlize Theron and Joel Edgerton (whose brother Nash directs).

Playing Harold, a mild-mannered accountant who gets caught up in a plot involving drug dealers and crooked entrepreneurs, it marks Oyelowo’s first real comic outing. “It was just the way it worked, really,” he says. “I became associated with more dramatic roles and those were roles I loved playing, but I do have a silly side, and I was definitely looking for something a bit lighter. When I read the script, I really felt like I’d found what I was looking for.”

Charlize Theron as Elaine Markinson and Oyelowo​ as Harold Soyinka who finds himself turning from a law-abiding citizen to a wanted criminal in the dark comedy ‘Gringo’

What’s more, his director allowed Oyelowo to play the character as a Nigerian immigrant, “which was something I was keen to do, having watched my [Nigerian] parents going through some of the challenges of being that kind of fish-out-of-water themselves”. For the record, Oyelowo was born in Oxford and raised in south London and Nigeria, where his grandfather was the king of a region in the west of the country. After seven years, with Nigeria then under a military government, the family returned to north London.

Watching Oyelowo in Gringo, it’s not such a stretch to think of Eddie Murphy in his pomp. Oyelowo’s eyes light up when I mention this. “That’s not a bad thing at all!” he cries. “I love Eddie Murphy, I love those movies.” He cites Coming to America in particular. “The thing I love about Gringo is that it’s not just self-consciously comedic; it’s the absurd situation that the character finds himself in [that’s funny]. There are definitely films I can think of with Eddie Murphy that have a similar sensibility.”

The British actor received a Golden Globe nomination for his role as Dr Martin Luther King in 2014’s ‘Selma’ (Rex)

As crazed as the film gets, Oyelowo reports that his most harrowing experience during the shoot was enduring “the worst food poisoning of my life” and filming the sequence where his car crashes. “That definitely goes into the shenanigans file in terms of the movie,” he says. I’m left with the image of him running to a Portaloo in the Mexican desert. “Have that image and then please immediately disperse of it,” he replies. “It is not one I want you to keep.”

What about shooting in Mexico? The cast may be a mix of Brits, Australians and South Africans, but was there much anti-American sentiment when they arrived? “No, not least because we had an entirely Mexican crew,” he says. “We were very much the minority as opposed to coming in and throwing our weight around.” He did see some “Donald Trump pinatas”, however, at a party “where people were striking the pinatas with relish”.

Oyelowo starred in 2016’s ‘A United Kingdom’, in which he played King Seretse Khama of Botswana, who controversially marries a British white woman, Ruth Williams, played by Rosamund Pike (Rex)

Beyond Gringo, Oyelowo is soon to be seen in A Wrinkle In Time, the Disney-backed fantasy that reunites him with Selma’s director Ava DuVernay. Then there’s the intriguing dystopian drama Chaos Walking, directed by Edge of Tomorrow’s Doug Liman and based on the series of novels by Patrick Ness. “You have to be pretty ballsy and brave to attack those stories. I just love the conceit of it: what life might be like in a world where women can hear and see the thoughts of men, but it doesn’t work the other way around.”

After Chaos Walking, which co-stars Star Wars starlet Daisy Ridley, the Cloverfield film and a brief turn in Chris Nolan’s Interstellar, Oyelowo is looking like something of a sci-fi geek. “I don’t know that I’m a sci-fi geek but I’m definitely a fan of the genre,” he chuckles. Living in Los Angeles with his wife, actress Jessica Oyelowo, and their four children, aged between 6 and 16, “those are the films that I do that they get the most excited about,” he says.

The actor appears in the JJ Abrams-produced sci-fi ‘The Cloverfield Paradox’, a film that was dropped on Netflix just hours after it was first advertised during the Super Bowl (Rex)

He’s currently back in Europe to film a six-part BBC adaptation of Victor Hugo’s classic Les Misérables, with Andrew Davies on scripting duties. Credited as executive producer, Oyelowo – who plays Inspector Javert to Dominic West’s bread-stealing Jean Valjean – has already gone behind the camera for several projects including 2016’s A United Kingdom, in which he played Seretse Khama. But taking on Hugo’s monster novel is a different matter. “This is definitely my biggest undertaking to date.”

While he won’t be following Russell Crowe, the last person to play Javert on screen, and bursting into song (“we are very much sticking to the Victor Hugo source material,” he confirms), you can, should you wish, hear Oyelowo’s dulcet tones in Gringo. There’s a sequence where he sings along to Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It”. “Being a child of the Nineties… it’s a full circle moment for me getting to sing a Will Smith song, [he was] one of those figures for me growing up that made me think about a career as an actor.”

Is he the natural successor to Eddie Murphy and Will Smith? Probably not. But back then, those stars were almost unique in furthering the cause for black actors. Now, after the success of fellow Brits Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out) and John Boyega (Star Wars: The Force Awakens), not to mention the Oscar success of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight and the current box-office smash that is Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, it seems like a moment to savour.

“I’m trying to be really careful about not getting too happy too soon,” says Oyelowo, sounding a note of caution. “Everyone pats themselves on the back and goes, ‘Wow! We’re much better now!’ But people making the decisions about what films get made remain the same group of people, and it’s people like me, or Barry Jenkins or Ryan Coogler, who’ve been struggling, struggling, struggling… then this apathy sets in, where we go, ‘Oh, we fixed that problem’.” The more scripts like Gringo he can star in, the better.

‘Gringo’ is in UK cinemas now