David Oyelowo on Nightingale 2015 Emmy Nomination, Queen of Katwe & Rachel Dolezal [Exclusive]

David Oyelowo is ruling Hollywood as one of the most respected young Black actors in the business, and it should come as no suprise. With a name that translates into "a King deserves respect," the 39-year-old British actor always knew he was destined to do great things. Following notable roles as a Tuskeegee Airman in George Lucas' Red Tails, Louis Gaines in The Butler and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Oscar-winning film Selma, there is no denying the world is bowing down and taking notice. Here, Oyelowo dishes on his challenging potrayal of a mentally disturbed war veteran in HBO's Nightingale, for which he garnered a 2015 Emmy Nomination, his upcoming film, Queen of Katwe, starring opposite Lupita Nyung'o and what we can all learn from former NAACP Spokane president Rachel Dolezal. 

Danica Daniel: You have a very unique last name. Does it translate into anything significant?
David Oyelowo: It’s a Nigerian name, and it means "a King deserves respect" basically. It gets butchered in American and in the UK where I grew up. For the record you basically put the letter o on both sides of yellow, that’s how you pronounce it: o-yellow-o.

Your performance in Nightingale was amazing. What inspired you to take that role?
In all honesty, it was kind of a dare to myself. When I read that script, there was something about it that felt insurmountable. One guy in a house?! Someone who has done something so terrible yet you’re asking the audience to stick with him for an hour and a half?! I haven’t played a role that was that exposing before so there were just so many things about it that felt like a unique opportunity that I just couldn’t walk away from. So above and beyond even specifically being drawn to playing Peter Snowden, I knew I would be a better actor placing myself under the pressure that the role would. That was one of the main motivations.

What kind of preparation did you have to do for this film? I would think it might be intimidating to be the only person onscreen for 115 minutes.
The preparation mainly was trying to give a degree of specificity to the state of mind that Peter is in. Clearly anyone can see that something is off about Peter. But I didn’t want to just play general mental illness or general weirdness. I wanted it to be rooted in something real. So I employed the wisdom of a clinical psychologist and had him read the script and basically just [asked], “What do you think is going on from what you’re reading on the page?” And he said “I’ve seen people who have dissociative identity disorder be like Peter, basically what they used to call multiple personalities disorder.” In talking to the clinical psychologist and him identifying that specific syndrome that gave me the tools as it were to root playing that character in a specific syndrome. Didn’t just leave me playing him generalized. So I looked into that condition, it’s a very real condition. Basically that condition affects people who have suffered real trauma in their past. These alters, these versions of themselves, deal with their tricky situations and that really helped me find different ways that Peter navigates the pressure he is under. Some of it is self-imposed and some of it imposed from without. So that was a lot of my preparation.

So you never read the script for Nightingale and thought, oh man this guy he kills his mother, I don’t want to play that guy?
There are definitely characters that I do not want to play. I think there’s nothing about this that just feels dark for the sake of being dark or exploitative. I have no interest in that. What I look for are layered, complicated characters who are evocative of what it is to be a human being. And if that’s truly what’s on the page, it’s never one note. You’re never looking at someone who’s just purely evil or purely good. That’s what I felt when I read Nightingale even though this guy has done something despicable that’s unimaginable for me as a person. But the film reveals a humanity in him that really, of course does not exonerate him from what he did, but it gives you an insight into a person like Peter. And these people are all over the place. He’s suffering with abject loneliness, PTSD and he’s also someone who has been brought up in a very heavy-handed parental situation. These are all things that we can all relate to even if what he did is not something we can relate to. His humanity is evident elsewhere.

How was it working with Nightingale’s Executive Producer Brad Pitt?
Brad came onto the film in a very roundabout, unexpected way. We made this film very much as a low budget indie that we at first thought would get a nice, small distributor, maybe have a couple of weeks in theaters in New York and LA and end up streaming somewhere. We made the film, had high hopes for it, but a lot of festivals and distributors turned it down. I think they didn’t know quite what to make of it. I did Nightingale before I did Selma and while shooting Selma thankfully Stephanie Allain, who runs the LA Film Festival, did program the film and we got some amazing reviews out of that festival. I showed them to DeDe Gardner, who runs Brad’s company Plan B Entertainment along with Jeremy Kleiner and they really wanted to see the film. I showed them the film, they loved the film and showed it to Brad who thankfully also loved the film and they came on board and helped introduce me to HBO, which is how the film got the platform it now has.

I read that preparing for Nightingale inspired you to take on the role of Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma.
I was actually cast as Dr. King in 2010 it just took a long amount time to get the film made for all sorts of reasons. But what Nightingale did do in relation to Selma is that, having made the choice to effectively stay in character the whole time, I reaped the benefits of that to the degree that I thought, well that’s something I definitely want to use also for Selma. If Nightingale hadn’t come along, I don’t know that I would have had the bravery to employ that methodology for Selma. I’d thought of it as a little bit of a pretentious methodology, the idea of staying in character. Doing Nightingale, where there were no other actors who would potentially poke fun at me for staying in character the whole time, I did it. The thing I learned from doing it on Nightingale is that you don’t second guess your choices as a character. You’re so in it that you feel closer to the truth. And that’s one thing you definitely want to have playing Dr. King.

Is it difficult going from a role like Peter in Nightingale, who is a fictional character, to playing one of the most recognizable figures in history?
Yeah, both roles were daunting for very different reasons. We’ve touched upon Nightingale being very exposing and very challenging knowing you’re the only person there to hold the audience’s attention for the entirety of the film. The challenges of playing Dr. King are that, [with] someone who so well-known, everyone has a version of him in their head. So even though what you’re hoping to do is reveal sides of Dr. King that they didn’t necessarily know, you’re still doing that through the prism of having them believe you in that role. Believing you in that role is very tied to the way he speaks, the way he moves, the way he looks, and so you have to try and balance all of those things while also bringing depth and hopefully revelation to what people know and there’s no guarantee you’ll succeed at that. So both roles, in their own way were kind of gambles for me.

Martin Luther King Jr. was obviously a civil rights leader and worked a lot with the NAACP. Do you have any comments or opinions on the Rachel Dolezal situation?
The thing that it really highlights to me is how irrational racism actually is. That lady could pass as black. The mere fact of her stating she was and being in circles that suggested she was could create a world in which her opportunities are different, the attitudes towards her are different and the life she leads is different really shows how crazy [racism] really is at its core. Prejudice is born out of fear of what you don’t know. But if a woman who is white can absolutely passed for being black with seemingly just curling her hair? The minute you realize she’s white, you’re looking at both pictures and realizing she doesn’t look that different! It’s not like a gigantic leap. So in many ways I hope it just highlights to people how ridiculous it is that they may think of someone differently just because of a notion of what they think they are as opposed to who they actually are as a human being.

In your next film Captive, Like Martin Luther King Jr in Selma, you also play a real character?
That again is a very different role for me. It absolutely feeds into the question you asked me about playing character who’ve done terrible things and whether one wants to run away from those kind of roles or gravitate towards them. I'm playing Brian Nichols, who is a guy who killed four people. It’s a true story. It happened in Atlanta in 2005. But the reason I was drawn to that is his interaction with Ashley Smith [played by House of Cards actress Kate Mara], who he took hostage. It is a situation whereby she ditched a drug that had ruined her life for several years in the shape of meth and it took this scary, devastating seven hour hostage situation to wake up and realize she’d been given a second chance. And I’m always drawn to stories whereby the light inside the darkness. Sometimes you’ve got to see the darkness in order to see the light.

You are currently in South Africa filming Queen of Katwe opposite Lupita Nyong’o. Sounds thrilling!
It’s set in Uganda but we’re shooting half of it in Uganda, the other half in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is a film about a young Ugandan girl who’s from the slums of Katwe in Kampala, Uganda. It follows this girl, Phiona, who is discovered to have this incredible chess talent. She has a chess talent but she’s growing up in the slums of Kampala, a very unlikely place from which to go on and become a chess champion. But that’s exactly what she did, and she did it with the help of an amazing man called Robert Katende, who I play. Lupita Nyong’o plays Phiona’s mother, who of course is living a very tough life in the slums in Kamapala. She doesn’t see a world in which her daughter can go on to have this life as a chess player. So a lot of the tension in the film is between myself and Lupita, who see Phiona’s future in very different ways.

You’ve starred opposite of Tom Cruise, Forest Whitaker, James Franco, Terrance Howard and Oprah Winfrey to name a few. Anybody else you are dying to share screen time with?
I absolutely adore Ryan Gosling. His talent is just off the charts. He’s someone I would love to act opposite one day. I just think he’s a very, very unique talent.

Congratulations on being nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in Nightingale. Do the awards motivate you?
In all honesty, it means less now than it used to I think. With Selma, there was such a lot noise around the awards of it all and what Selma really highlighted to me is the reception of the film doesn’t have to be and isn’t necessarily tied to awards. But my profession is one in which you don’t know if you’re good without people telling you. And awards are a pretty significant and very public way of being celebrated. I guess the short answer is that they’re nice to receive but there’s always a danger that in receiving them, that becomes the endgame and I don’t want that ever to be the case for me. I want to always do challenging work, I want to do work that some people may like, some people may not. And there’s always that danger that in a bid to be liked and celebrated you dilute your artistic voice. So, lovely to receive but you’ve got to keep a healthy distance to have your craft as an actor.

Take a sneak peek at Oyelowo and Mara in the true-life thriller Captive, set to release this Fall on September 18, 2015.