The first thing that strikes you about Chiwetel Ejiofor is his eyes. They’re so expressive, almost hypnotic. So well do they telegraph intelligence and empathy that they do more than linger. They burn. Their intensity clicks faster than pronouncing his mellifluous name (CHEW-eh-tell EDGE-ee-oh-four). Those eyes convince us of his characters’ truth, whether he’s playing an interstellar assassin in 2005’s “Serenity” or Solomon Northup, the real-life freeborn violinist who is kidnapped into slavery in last year’s “12 Years a Slave.” The film is based upon Northup’s 1853 memoir, in which he describes fighting to keep his sense of self intact: “I don’t want to survive,” Ejiofor says in the film. “I want to live.”
In my piece at Word and Film today, I share some little-known tips about this performer who first caught critics’ attention in 2002’s “Dirty Pretty Things.” Among them? That he’s based two of his best-known roles on his father, a doctor who had immigrated from Britain to Nigeria.