It’s the end of the world as we know it, and he feels fine. That’s probably because Chiwetel Ejiofor has been through it all.The British actor has spent a fair proportion of the last 20 years in movies where all has been lost—and his character has lived to tell the tale. In disaster king Roland Emmerich’s 2012, which features charming scenes like Los Angeles collapsing into a pit and tidal waves over the Himalayas, Ejiofor plays the geologist who realizes the Mayan Calendar doomsday is about to kick in. In Z for Zachariah, he’s among the three last survivors on a radiation-poisoned planet with only Margot Robbie and Chris Pine for company. In The Martian, he’s a NASA scientist who devises ways for a stranded Matt Damon to build a brave new world all alone on Mars. Or in the 2005 film, Serenity, it’s the 26th century, and Planet Earth has long been destroyed, necessitating colonization of a new star system, of course. That’s not all! In the now classic, Children of Men, we see Ejiofor as Luke, part of the resistance in a grim future of London in 2027, where all people are infertile. And the list wouldn’t be complete without the Marvel Universe, where he has a recurring role as Mordo, next to be seen in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness—the end of the world is pretty much the essential threat/plot/consequence of anything and everything.

“Why so much Apocalypse?” I ask Ejiofor, joining me over the video-waves from London. He acknowledges the theme is important to him. “I think I’m definitely drawn to those kinds of stories. I’m interested in how those things play out, I’m interested in what humanity looks like under stress, in chaos, because it’s so revealing. And it can be very truthful.”

All this experience has placed him in good stead to take on his new role as the lead in sci-fi Showtime series, The Man Who Fell to Earth, a concept based on the 1963 novel by Walter Tevis. The original blurb on the book’s cover still rings true for the reboot [the first iteration a 1976 film starring David Bowie]: “He made the lonely journey, leaving behind a broken world and a promise to rescue his fellow beings from the devastation their wars had wrought.”

**THEORY** sweater and **ALEXANDER MCQUEEN** pants.

The ‘fish out of water’ alien is a winning theme in popular entertainment, from Mork and Mindy to My Stepmother is an Alien to ALF, to that most famous of aliens, Superman. In fact, when you think about it, most of the superheroes and comic book stars...well, they’re all aliens in some form. But few alien portrayals have been as profound and mind-blowing as David Bowie’s apparition as an enigmatic angular visitor in British director Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 masterpiece.

The new Showtime series is not a remake, but instead more of a multi-part sequel. Ejiofor gives me the juice, “It picks up the same story, but 40 years later. And then it splinters into all these strands of the story, with conversations that hark back to the original film, but also talk about where we are now; what our relationship is to the planet right now. And what an Alien might make of us.”

From here, Ejiofor and I dig in. And the results? Well, coolly grounded on Earth yet cognisant of our impending unmooring when we least expect it.

**MICHAEL BROWN** blazer, turtleneck, and pants and **SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO** shoes.

How does it feel to be following in those footsteps?

When I first heard The Man Who Fell to Earth, I took a bit of a breath. I was very excited, of course, because of David Bowie. I remember watching the original film years ago and not really understanding it, then watching it again and understanding it more as a ‘full’ adult, but still feeling like it was a really esoteric, very strange, but kind of wonderful film. But always being awed by David Bowie, like everybody else. Like so many of the things that he touched, it’s become so iconic—the imagery is iconic, the Bowie music that you associate with it is iconic. It’s an extension of his entire legacy. So, I was like, ‘I wonder what they’re going to do with it?’ But I was intrigued by [writers and showrunners] Alex Kurtzman (Transformers,

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and 3, People Like Us) and Jenny Lumet (daughter of director Sidney Lumet; The Mummy, Star Trek), and
I think their work is so varied and so rich. I knew they were going to bring something to it, not just try to make a carbon copy, or anything ‘clumsy.’ I knew that it would be really considered and thought through. And you know, I wasn’t wrong. I read the scripts, 10 episodes, and I thought they had created something really special. Really different.

***

And it is. After dropping into the New Mexico desert, ‘Faraday’—the name adopted by Ejiofor’s alien—seeks out Naomie Harris, who plays a brilliant yet beleaguered scientist who has the knowledge to aid him on his aqueous quest. He convinces her to drive him to a portal near Shiprock where he meets the rebooted ‘Thomas Jerome Newton’ who lives on in the matrix (played piercingly by Bill Nighy). We realize Newton miserably failed his mission to bring water to his planet, Anthea, and millions of people have perished waiting for him. The remaining Antheans now wait and hope.The clock is ticking before the remaining water runs out and they all perish. The more innocent, idealistic Faraday is pitted against his former mentor; the grumpy, gritty, aggressive alcoholic Newton. Case in point, Faraday asks Newton, “Is this a cortextual download?” To which Newton replies, “For fuck’s sake, this isn’t going to work if you keep talking like a spaceman. They’re called dreams here!”

***

**DIOR MEN** sweater and **VALENTINO** pants.

Do you see what went wrong with his planet, with flashbacks as in the Roeg film?

You do. You get a sense of life on Anthea and what the problems are. And it’s two-fold for Faraday—it’s what he physically has had to escape, and what this has also done to him psychologically. What it has meant to live in a planet that’s falling apart, a planet that’s stopped working for the population is in a great deal of stress and has been driven to that point. And to come to planet Earth that’s still rich, that still has this abundance, and see people taking that for granted. Not that it’s predictive, it’s just two experiences. It’s not saying, ‘This will be the experience of Planet Earth.’ We don’t know. Nobody, on all sides of the debate, has complete clarity over what the future will hold. But what he does have is his experience on his own planet, so he knows what that experience is like. And how terrible it can be.

When Bowie’s alien falls to Earth in the mid-1970s, he comes up against corporations, money, the Deep State, exploitation of resources...What does your alien find today? Is it a better world?

Faraday arrives in a world that is complicated, definitely exploitative, designed to exploit the resources of the planet and each other, to just take. The corporation and the moneyed sense of reality is only one facet of the experience. He also meets people and interacts with people. He then engages with one particular family, and through them comes to understand love, human connection, and its power.

***

There is a legend that Bowie, who had been existing mainly on white powder and air at the time, developed a passion for ice cream while shooting in America, which Roeg had to prevent him from eating so as not to fatten up and ruin the continuity. We note that Ejiofor is in far less worrying physical form than The Thin White Duke when he strides into town in his skin like Terminator—and that there are new dynamics in play by casting the alien as a man who reads as ‘Black’ in America. And as a naked unarmed Black man, the cops are called and is brought down by taser prongs. The series is clearly unafraid to confront the racial dynamics in a post-George Floyd America from the jump. While arrested and handcuffed to a chair in the police station, Martha Plimpton’s seen-it-all-before cop teaches him manners—not just to scream ‘fuck’ to get what you want, but also to say ‘please.’ Welcome to 2022, USA.

While he’s an expert on brave new worlds, Ejiofor has a solid film and theatre career that spans all bases—from blockbusters to independents. Yet one ideal has reigned supreme, the types of films he likes to make are the kinds that change lives. His own life was changed at 19-years-old, when he broke through being cast by Steven Spielberg in Amistad, while still studying drama at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. And though he’s spent much of his ensuing career with an American accent of various stripes, Ejiofor’s natural speaking voice is calm and steady and his accent clear and very British. He answers questions in grammatically correct whole paragraphs, with nary a spare or frivolous word. He’s proper. Which makes sense—born in 1977 in Forest Gate, a green suburb of North East London, which was in olden times the gate to Epping Forest, by the ancient Roman Road. Ejiofor was privately educated at the historic Dulwich College, established in 1619, in its current location since 1870, and began acting training at the school at 13-years-old, a teen joining the National Theatre.

**SALVATORE FERRAGAMO** coat, jacket, top, pants and shoes.

Ejiofor’s family roots are in Nigeria, his parents arriving in Britain after fleeing the Biafran War in the late 1960s. He’s never given in to pressure to change his distinctive name—and looking into it, one can see why. In the Igbo language (pronounced ‘Ibo’), his first name means ‘God Brings;’ Umeadi, his middle name means ‘Strength.’ His surname is a compression of ‘one who holds the Ofo’—the ofo being a symbolic staff of truth which is a traditional method of proving sincerity, like putting a hand on the Bible in Western culture. Strung all together you get quite a powerful statement: “What God brought, There will be strength, When you stand on the path of truth.” It would be plain bad luck to mess with that powerful a conjunction. ’Chad Edwards’ or ‘Chris Everett’ or whatever blandness early industry contacts probably suggested to him, could never.

Having a distinctive name—and buckets of innate talent— worked out. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 2014 for 12 Years a Slave in the Best Actor slot, and he won the BAFTA on his home turf. Queen Elizabeth II has noticed him too. An OBE in 2008 was followed by a CBE for services to drama delivered at Buckingham Place in 2015. That’s Commander to you, commoners. But one could never imagine the soft-spoken actor playing up his airs and graces. Caught up in it all, Ejiofor has had time to reflect on his stellar trajectory only recently. “That’s what’s really been interesting about the early part of the pandemic.The sense of having to be forced to stop. And I just wasn’t conditioned to that at all. I was conditioned to always be building, and asking what’s the next thing, when’s the next flight? Having to reassess and reevaluate, to stay in one place is something that I definitely need to have more of in my life. It is really important to take stock. Otherwise, things do tend to just run away. And so if there’s anything positive—and I’m not the only person to say this—if there’s anything positive that came out of it, it was that. It was just the capacity to slow down a little bit, to look around—Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

But you don’t seem to have slowed down too much—you even made a film called Locked Down.

Yes well, that’s true. It lasted a few weeks, and then I got a call, and it was like, ‘Let’s go back to work.’ Let’s do it right here. I shot Doctor Strange just after we shot Locked Down. And then I started filming on The Man Who Fell to Earth immediately after that.

When you were growing up, did you read Marvel comics, or other science fiction or fantasy? Were you into that world at all?

I was into fantasy worlds... More in a kind of Middle Earth way, but with a twist. There was a board game called Blood Bowl, which was like American football, but with orcs and elves, I liked playing. I enjoyed that sort of more practical fantasy world.

***

**TOM FORD** jacket, **MR. P.** top and **HUNTSMAN** pants.

I look up Blood Bowl, which I had never heard of, and it’s exactly as Ejiofor described. Released in the British market in 1986, making Ejiofor around 9-10-years-old, the perfect time for a kid to get into a fun, violent mash-up of football and rugby played by battling teams of figurine goblins, halflings, and ogres across a field. The game still has a cult following, and today, of course, has morphed into an electronic version. The now Mordo from Doctor Strange and Conall from Maleficent: Mistress of Evil feels the sci-fi/ fantasy genre is a layered one with much to offer. “If science fiction is done well, it has the ability to shine a light on our world,” Ejiofor says, “I just think it’s incredibly difficult to do. It can often fall a little bit flat, not quite add up. But in that sort of fantasy realm, which is where I put Marvel, it really has the capacity to have that sort of remove, so that these parallel universes can really talk about community, heroism, interpersonal dynamics, and also be a blockbuster event you want to go watch in the cinema.”

Ejiofor’s own first film as a director had no need for CGI, prosthetics or a budget of 300 million dollars to convey its heartening, instructive message. After adapting the incredible true story of William Kamkwamba for the screen, Ejiofor wrote, directed, and starred in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Premiering at Sundance in 2019, it was a genuine, down to earth human tale. With a terrible drought, their lands fail to produce crops for a small African village and famine threatens. One boy, through smarts, spirit, and sweat sets out to fix the situation—and young William is more successful in bringing water to his struggling homeland than either Thomas Jerome Newton or Faraday.

How did The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind come about?

I read William Kamkwamba’s book not that long after it came out, so maybe about 10 years ago now. I was struck by the authentic nature of it. I felt that it was very ‘real’ in a way that I hadn’t seen represented in the cinema. It reminded me of visits to Nigeria. Obviously, Malawi is very different [from] Nigeria, but there are certain similarities, with their village community, and that same sense of people and connection that I found really authentic and rich. I went back and forth to Malawi for several years, and then we shot the film right there in William’s village. William took the time in the book, and I hope we did in the film, to explain how those circumstances came about. They didn’t come out of the blue sky—there are reasons people are put into these incredibly difficult positions. Out of this real stress comes this boy who does something really remarkable. It also reflects so many other young people in Africa, and other places in the world, that are under these kinds of stresses, who have all this potential.

What happened to William? How is he?

He’s doing really well. It’s interesting actually—William went to the African Leadership Academy, and then went to Dartmouth College, which I put in a little text at the end of the film. And then Maxwell Simba, the actor who played William, has done the exact same thing—he went to the African Leadership Academy and now he’s in his first year of Dartmouth, he’s doing engineering, and also doing drama as well.

**RALPH LAUREN** suit and shirt and stylist’s own tie.

So he’s following in your footsteps with acting. That’s so great. Was there ever someone you had as a mentor like that, early on, when you began in theatre?

Can I say, ‘My mentor was Shakespeare?’ The truth is, when I started to read Shakespeare, I was really struck by it. Because he was talking about certain things which were private emotions that I had. And I, for a while, I thought that I had discovered this brilliant playwright. Because he talked very intuitively about things that I felt were mine alone. He talked very eloquently, beautifully about these things that I was thinking and feeling. And that was really powerful for me. I was obsessed with Shakespeare, doing Shakespeare, for a long time.

***

Ejiofor’s facility with the Bard led to a performance of Othello at the Donmar opposite Ewan McGregor as Iago in 2007, which is pretty much the peak of achievement for any thespian. For a taste of his ability, check out his Hamlet soliloquy on Youtube from director Lawrence Bridges documentary, Why, Shakespeare, where actors discuss how their encounters with the poetic playwright changed their lives.

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Do you think doing theatre keeps one ‘sharp,’ as some actors say?
I haven’t been on stage for a while now, and that is definitely something that concerns me. I thought that you could never— that you couldn’t lose that ‘muscle.’ But then I was looking at some rehearsal images of Lennie James, who is doing something at the moment. I just saw a picture of him, in the middle of talking, sitting at a rehearsal table. And I realized that I had a bit of distance to that experience. It’s been six or so years now since I’ve been in that specific space. I think I’m recognizing that it’s definitely about time that I should figure out what I’m going to do next on stage. I’m excited to discover what that is. I don’t know yet.

***

After he’d gotten to know the Collected Works inside and out, Ejiofor found some more flesh-and-blood role models. “Later I started to have real film mentors, to find actors, directors, and writers I really looked up to; I was very excited about Denzel Washington, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Scorsese films. I was very inspired when I was working with Stephen Frears and cinematographer Chris Menges in my early 20s on Dirty Pretty Things, working on plays with Roger Michel, Bill Nighy on Blue/Orange. Then, when I was filming Talk to Me with Don Cheadle, it was about understanding more about how one is on set, how one carries oneself on set...What the art form is.

Ejiofor clearly learned fast—today, a “6 Degrees of Separation” chart for Chiwetel Ejiofor would actually outdo Kevin Bacon. His costars and collaborators encompass all those mentioned above, alongside Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Joel Edgerton, Martin Sheen, LaKeith Stanfield, Danny Glover, Angelina Jolie, Rooney Mara, Emilia Clarke, Thandiwe Newton, Lupita Nyong’o, Spike Lee, Ridley Scott, John Singleton, David Mamet, Alfonso Cuarón, Joss Whedon and on, and on—the list is truly exhaustive.

***

**MICHAEL BROWN** blazer, turtle neck, and pants.

You’ve worked with so many great people on so many great projects. Is there anyone you still haven’t worked with that you want to?

It’s interesting now. I think that there was a time when I was more engaged, like, ‘I really wish this person would call me,’ or send me a script. Now I feel like I’m in another space. I’m really excited about figuring out what I want to see, not necessarily where I want to be, anymore. That might be a part of my life that’s a little bit in the rearview mirror. It’s more—what do I want to create, what do I really want to do, and how might I go about building that?

What are your thoughts on the future of cinema? Will the two-hour feature film disappear? Or will people only have the attention span to watch three-second clips on their phone?

I think it depends. It’s up to us in a way, to establish what we want to see, what stories we want to tell, and who we want to engage. Obviously, there is a way that cinema does collapse. I love the idea of people sitting in the cinema, and experiencing films in the cinema, but at the same time, I think that ‘cinema’ is separate to the medium. When somebody is creating a piece of cinema, they can create that for anything, for the phone, for any medium. I watched all of the great movies, which I think of as great cinema, and I watched all of them on one of those TV VHS players, those all-in-one things, in the 90s.

And that brings us to one of your most powerful achievements in film. Looking back on 12 Years A Slave, what was it like to all be a European team: you, Steve McQueen, and Michael Fassbender, telling a very primarily American story of the way the American system was founded, back to the Americans?

I think that’s really interesting. Years later, reflecting back on that, and the need for that. The landscape was just quite different then. There really weren’t stories told from the perspective of people who were enslaved. There were films that were about the circumstances of slavery, maybe through the eyes of one or two characters who were white characters, in the South, or Presidents, or whatever. But the story actually from deep inside the slave experience was something that hadn’t really been told. There was Alex Haley’s Roots, but since then nothing had really tackled it from inside the experience. When the opportunity of Solomon Northup’s book came up, it felt like, if we could possibly do it, we should try and do it.

And what of your relationship to the experience, with the now passage of time?

I felt very connected to it because of my specific history and understanding the relationships, for example, such as that of the Igbo population in Nigeria, to the Transatlantic slave trade, and that being such a profound history. I remember somebody saying to me when I was in Savannah, Georgia, talking about the bolts on the walls, ‘Those were for the Igbos.’ And me explaining that ‘I’m Igbo.’ We were all very connected to it, very deeply. And I know that that’s true of everybody who was in the project. From Michael Fassbender to myself, to Steve McQueen, any one of us could very easily connect ourselves and our heritage to the context we were talking about in the film. Of course, it’s talking about slavery, about this very specific time. But it isn’t just the race dynamics, it’s more about the interpersonal dynamics: when someone is putting pressure on someone else, is bullying, harassing somebody else in places that they can’t get out of and how that defines so much of our existence in terms of people that we meet, and people that we are oppressed by.

Did you ever feel like an alien as a British person ‘coming to America’?

I think that as someone who’s from the UK but often spends time in America, you can find yourself on the outside looking in. Not feeling that you can ‘dive in.’ The only way I can put it is the kind of drama, the sort of American drama is so ‘full,’ and so part of the cultural landscape. It’s so active and engaging. And it can be deeply positive, moving, and progressive ideas, and result in these deeply kind of paranoid and painful realities. I feel like I’m sitting slightly askance, slightly to the side, observing and adding my tuppence, not in the middle of the bed, not engaged in the way that people are there. That’s a cultural distinction I think, and it’s quite a profound one. Sometimes the distinction is that the people in America are very very nice indeed, but the system is completely ruthless. In a way, the opposite can be true in the UK. The system is benevolent but the people... [laughs] are very hard work.

***

It’s a rare thing to have the opportunity to speak to such an intelligent man who has been in many movies featuring aliens and has just played an alien. I want to know if he has an inside track on whether The Truth is Out There. So I hazard to ask a the last question that brings us back to the beginning of our discussion.

Do you believe in aliens?

Yes. I think it’s incredibly likely that there is other life in the universe.

What forms might they take? Would they look like you, or David Bowie?
That, I don’t know. Maybe, in infinite universes, there’s me and David Bowie.

Have you thought about them a lot?

Yes. I’ve been thinking about them obviously in terms of The Man Who Fell to Earth and thinking about them in terms of the reports that are coming out from the CIA, et cetera. One of the real ways of knowing that the pandemic was really occupying everybody was that the CIA reported that they had all these UFOs, and nobody cared. It was amazing. Clearly, there is stuff going on. But I wonder if we have the capacity to see and engage with aliens in our dimension. In our kind of limited way of looking at things—I don’t mean psychologically, I just mean in our ‘3D’ world.

***

I respond by telling him that maybe in a few thousand years they will look back on our stage of evolution now and be amazed how primitive we were. I have this book, Easy Journeys to Other Planets, from 1972 and it explains how we can all travel between dimensions just by tuning our mind’s vibrations outward and moving up through the cosmic ‘spheres’... But right now, we are limited to our five senses, which have evolved to eat from trees, and drink from the river... Our perceptions are based on that 3D world, not a 5D universe or however many dimensions there are.

Ejiofor concurs. He’s optimistic about all of us making some brave new friends, soon. “I think we would need to have several more dimensions to really be able to understand... If we were exposed to one or two more dimensions, we would probably encounter aliens very quickly.”

Maybe they’re already on the way. Not long after I speak to Ejiofor, exciting news breaks. It’s almost like the beginning of a Roland Emmerich movie: astronomers announce that they have just picked up radio signals coming exactly 18 minutes apart from ‘a mystery object’ somewhere out there in our own Milky Way Galaxy. If they turn up soon, I propose Chiwetel Ejiofor as the ideal Ambassador for us to send out to greet them. Polite, polished, cultured, and with many films’ worth of experience in alien worlds, and all that Shakespeare in his head. He probably already speaks their language.