by Nev Pierce | Empire
David Oyelowo’s faith pays off
WRAPPED IN JULY AND NOW IN THE OSCAR RACE, Martin Luther King pic Selma has been a sprint and a marathon for David Oyelowo. Now, he’s a rising star who’s worked with Cruise, Spielberg and Nolan, but when he read the script in 2007, he was a jobbing actor in LA. “Basically God told me I would play this role,” says Oyelowo, who shares Dr. King’s strong faith. “It didn’t make any sense — British actor, two months off the boat, not really a guy I had looked at and thought I’d love to play him. It was like a thunderbolt.” He prayed and worked and… flunked the audition. But that director, and others, came and went. Then Ava DuVernay — who’d directed him in Middle Of Nowhere — joined, and finally Oyelowo became the perfect person for the story of King’s part in the Selma marches over African-American voting rights in 1965. The aim was to show “who is the man behind the pulpit?” and Oyelowo’s Golden Globe-nominated turn captures the orator and the man — flaws and all. “The self-sacrifice he exhibited is only accentuated by seeing that he was a flesh-and-blood guy, as opposed to some kind of Civil Rights superhero.”