David Oyelowo on Creating an Inclusive Kingdom and Sticking With ‘Bass Reeves’ After Being Turned Down by Every Studio
It’s been 10 years since David Oyelowo made his U.S. breakthrough portraying Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in “Selma.” Playing the awe-inspiring civil rights leader was an opportunity for the British-Nigerian actor to live up to his surname, which translates to “a king deserves respect.”
Oyelowo has been reflecting on that time in his life a lot more lately, thanks in part to “Becoming King,” a documentary directed by his wife, Jessica Oyelowo, that captures the seven-year journey to bring “Selma” to the big screen.
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“It was a big year,” he says of 2014. “There was no way you could know the sheer amount of things that would happen, because at the beginning of it, nothing was happening. ‘Selma’ felt dead. I was in the middle of shooting ‘A Most Violent Year,’ having a good time with that, but just feeling in a state of limbo and then—”
He stops mid-thought. “Talking to you now is probably the moment I realized it was the most highs and lows of my life. ‘Selma’ got greenlit, we got to shoot it, but it was also the year my mum had a brain aneurysm. Truly a roller coaster.”
“Becoming King” also captures the genesis of Oyelowo’s work as a producer. He isn’t credited as such on “Selma,” but that’s where he learned how to do the job: “In the moment, I was just, to be perfectly frank, a desperate actor trying to will this opportunity that was nibbling at being a possibility.”
Oyelowo enlisted Ava DuVernay to direct and Oprah Winfrey to produce, but his efforts went far beyond that. He also suggested relative unknowns like LaKeith Stanfield and Stephan James for key roles.
Indeed, later that year, Oyelowo co-founded Yoruba Saxon, a production company focusing on “values-based content,” with an aim to “shift the culture and color outside the lines” by creating content for a global audience. That mission expanded in 2021 to include Mansa, an ad-supported streaming service that showcases narratives from the African diaspora.
“The things I’m most proud of over the last 10 years have been things that I’ve produced,” Oyelowo says. “They are all gifts to my younger self, things that I know would have changed my parents’ perception of what was possible for their son should they have seen them earlier in my life. They are all things that are indicative of my core ambition, which is to leave the world a little bit different than I found it.”
This year, Oyelowo portrayed three different family men: a rideshare driver in the throes of profound grief in the Oscar-nominated short “The After”; a man caught comedically unaware of his wife’s job as an assassin in “Role Play”; and yet another king of yesteryear, the legendary deputy U.S. marshal Bass Reeves in Paramount+’s “Lawmen: Bass Reeves.” It’s been a busy season, as he’s in the middle of filming his next show, the absurdist comedy “Government Cheese,” and writing a feature film script — both for Apple, where Yoruba Saxon has a first-look deal — all before he returns to his roots on the London stage to tackle the lead role in Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” this summer.
Los Angeles has become the Oyelowo family’s second home after David, Jessica and their young children moved from their native U.K. to the U.S. in 2007. There’s a coziness to Yoruba Saxon’s rustic-inspired offices, amplified by a crackling fire and a small candle burning. Framed posters of every movie they’ve produced, plus selections from Oyelowo’s filmography, such as “The Butler” and “Red Tails,” adorn the walls. There’s also a saddle from “Bass Reeves” slung over the railing with “Do his will, Justice,” a line of dialogue from the show, stitched onto the leather. Oyelowo’s office is downstairs, where there’s a gallery of family photos and a black-and-white shot of his late parents, who are memorialized in “Becoming King.”
There’s also a painting of Oyelowo’s personal Mt. Rushmore of actors — the late Sidney Poitier next to Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington and Daniel Day-Lewis — the people who do the job like he wants to do it. “Generally speaking, the acting I admire the most almost always is born out of folks who have treated it like a craft, like a skill to be honed, as something that you are in a perpetual state of learning around,” he says.
He’s only shared the screen with one actor from that quartet, playing a Black Union soldier opposite Day-Lewis’ Abraham Lincoln in “Lincoln.” In the film, Oyelowo’s Cpl. Ira Clark confronts the president about when Black people will be given the right to vote. Upon reflection, it’s a scene that underscores the role destiny has played in his career, given its juxtaposition with another scene from “Selma,” where his Dr. King asks the same question of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
“The crazy thing is to have Colman Domingo by my side both times,” he says of his fellow actor. “That was the God wink. Because of the thousands of actors who could have played it, for me to get to ask that twice of different presidents, 100 years apart, there is an arrow to why I’m here.”
Actually, he sees a link between the three roles he’s most proud of, all of whom are kings in different forms: King Henry VI for the Royal Shakespeare Co., the first time it had cast a Black actor as an English king; Seretse Khama in “A United Kingdom,” who was denied his kingship in Botswana for marrying a white British woman; and, of course, Dr. King.
“Some would say it’s coincidence; some would say we’re finding things where there aren’t things,” Oyelowo explains. “I walk in my own skin, so I know what ‘destiny’ feels like.”
Then there’s “Bass Reeves,” another project which took nearly a decade to get made, due in large part to Hollywood’s persistent blind spot about Black stories. Oyelowo took the project out to market twice, only to be turned down by every studio. “The story isn’t global. People aren’t going to want to see it far and wide,” he was told. But when the show launched in November, it became a massive hit. The studio reported that the premiere had become the streamer’s most-watched globally.
When I joke about the correlation between “Bass Reeves” and Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter,” the Grammy winner’s magnum opus that explores country music’s underrepresented Black roots, Oyelowo lets out a booming laugh. “I will take the credit,” he says, clapping his hands in delight and joking, “Yes, Beyoncé called me and said, ‘Is it OK if I don the cowboy hat?’”
He continues, turning more serious: The “Bass Reeves” TV series “has gone on to do more than I could have hoped for just in terms of the people who now have his name on their lips. The people who now know that one in three cowboys was Black; the people who have more of a sense of what happened during Reconstruction that preceded Jim Crow; the people who got to see this beautiful Black family who love each other, and this man and woman who are constantly trying to get back to each other, which are images we don’t tend to get to see — and for it to be made on a production level and scale that we rarely see.”
Plus, “Bass Reeves” afforded him the opportunity to continue in his other mission: to create a pipeline for the next generation of Black actors. This includes Lonnie Chavis and Demi Singleton, both of whom star in “Bass Reeves,” as well as Storm Reid, who he cast in 2019’s “Don’t Let Go,” and his own son, Caleb Oyelowo, who recently enrolled in his dad’s old drama school.
Learning that Caleb wanted to follow in his parents’ footsteps as actors “was both beautiful and, of course, concerning because you know the pitfalls. This is a heart-breaking business,” Oyelowo says, enunciating each word to emphasize his point. “No matter who you are — you can be the biggest movie star in the world, all the way down to that person still waiting tables 10 years and hoping that they’re going to get an audition — it will find a way to break your heart. The only thing that offsets that is how passionate you are about being a storyteller.”
Oyelowo sums it up thusly: his career has been marked, not by being a “groundbreaking” performer, but by breaking hard ground and planting the seed of opportunity for those that follow. It’s always irked him how easily audiences can trace the ascent of talented young white actors — watching Leonardo DiCaprio go from “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” to “The Revenant” — but the same is rarely true for Black talent.
“The opportunities almost never come outside of playing a historical figure that a white actor simply couldn’t play,” he explains. “And in order for them to play that kind of character, that character has to have done something of significance, which means that they’re in their 30s or 40s. That’s how we meet the world — playing Dr. King, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali or Ray Charles.”
It’s a problematic pattern — made even more so by the fact that industry success has felt like it’s predicated on isolation, that you’ve got to be “special” in order to survive.
“I’m not interested in being the One,” Oyelowo adds. “That, to me, is what failure looks like. A community that is constantly keeping the door open, constantly throwing seed back, helping to water it, celebrating it when it becomes crop, that’s where generational success lies.”
There is still one thing that eludes him though: an Academy Award nomination. His exclusion from the best actor category for “Selma” was among the slights that sparked the hashtag “Oscars So White” movement; then, in 2024, he wasn’t nominated for producing “The After” due to the Academy’s strict edict that “only two people can be designated as nominees” in the live-action short category. He admits that that part of the journey has been personally disappointing, but a greater good was birthed from it.
“I look at it as, without those years of pummeling away to get ‘Selma’ made and if I had been nominated, there would be no #OscarsSoWhite,” Oyelowo reasons. “The reality is, that has brought about real change. There are definitely films and folks that have been nominated that otherwise wouldn’t have been without that public outcry. That’s a major win. I don’t have any trinkets on my mantelpiece to show for it, but there is a cultural reward.” With a hopeful smile, he adds: “I’m still in it, so hopefully, I’ll have a few more at-bats and we’ll see what happens.”
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