By Florence Osakwe
It’s been a momentous year for Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor. While the London-born actor had appeared in over thirty films before his Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in January, the experience threw him into the limelight in a way he’s never experienced before.
And while he is rumoured to be making an appearance in the next James Bond flick, Chiwetel sat down with MTV UK to talk about his current movie, Half of A Yellow Sun, in which he stars alongsideThandie Newton.
“We were in a very remote part of Nigeria,” he told us of the location where they were filming.
“We were in a kind of even more remote area called Creek Town, which was only accessible by one of the tributaries of the Calabar River, which we’d take to work every day and it was beautiful but it’s not the most efficient way of trying to get anywhere and moving equipment and so on.”
“But being in that kind of, in the really rural areas of Nigeria I thought was really important to telling the story. Because it was in those sort of village communities that the war was really fought and the real cost of the war was really felt.”
And while the movie business may often seem glamorous, Chiwetel revealed that the cast and crew found themselves battling typhoid and malaria in their remote location.
“There was a typhoid/malaria mix actually which was nicknamed the ‘Creek cleanse’ if you wanted to lose a few pounds,” he joked, before reassuring us: “We all got through it.”
Chiwetel plays Odenigbo in the film, which tells the story of four people living through the struggle to establish and independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s. Ejiofor revealed that the film: “Mirrored a lot of what happened to my grandfather,” who was living in the area during that time.
“It’s a very beautiful story,” he added. And, despite the difficult subject matter, he explained: “At its heart is a love story.”
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