Chiwetel Ejiofor is one of those actors who is not yet a household name stateside but a guy who nearly everyone already knows. In the days leading up to my interview with him, I would tell people about it and they would rarely know who he was on name only. But once his resume was listed, they would almost always smile and say something like, "I love that guy." Dirty Pretty Things, Kinky Boots, Serenity, Tsunami, Talk to Me, American Gangster, and now David Mamet's latest film, Redbelt. If you happen to live in England, he's probably already a household name after winning the Olivier Award last month for his stage work in Othello, a category that also included two "Sir"s - Ian McKellen (as King Lear) and Patrick Stewart (as Macbeth). Ejiofor is the real deal, a man who will undoubtedly win an Oscar someday when the right part comes along. It's unlikely that the part is Mike Terry in Redbelt but it is a damn good movie and a nomination-worthy performance, yet again. The charming and surprisingly funny Ejiofor sat down with The Deadbolt in Chicago last month, just days after winning the Olivier, to talk about Shakespeare, Mamet, his career, and everything in between.

THE DEADBOLT: We have something in common - I was a theatre major because of William Shakespeare and David Mamet. So I'm curious what you think it is about Will and Dave that keeps bringing you back to their work?

CHIWETEL EJIOFOR: It's just these great speeches, I think. One of the things that I love about Mamet is that he has that ability to, seemingly out of nowhere, lay down a speech that becomes iconic. With Shakespeare, of course, it's "Now is the winter of our discontent". With Mamet, it's "You stupid f*cking c*nt, you child." [laughs] It sort of has the same rhythm. I've seen Glengarry Glen Ross so many times now and I still go. When they're doing Glengarry Glen Ross, I still get excited and I go. I remember the last time I saw it, fairly recently with Jonathan Pryce in London, and there were people who were - basically, it was almost like a sing-a-long. People in the audience were like, "You stupid f*cking c*nt, you child, you company man." [laughs] It's kind of amazing. It's sort of the same reaction people would have to, "To be or not to be." It's because people, as they did with Shakespeare, it really resonates and they really relate to it. It's just great, great writing. And the stakes - the thing that Shakespeare does that I always loved is that when the stakes get really high that it's unbelievable - and I think Mamet is able to achieve that kind of level as well in Oleanna and Glengarry - you sort of get to this point where the stakes are so high and then there's the twist that you haven't been expecting. I suppose in Glengarry, it's the moment that Williamson sniffs out "The Machine" Levine and it's devastating. You see people that've never seen it before and they're completely flabbergasted.

THE DEADBOLT: They're both interested in really powerful men with huge flaws.

EJIOFOR: Sure. When you look at Macbeth, that's Macbeth all over. He's extraordinarily powerful and important, but he is undone by his own demonic sense of what's going on. It's a sort of schizophrenia and deep self-loathing that I think is symptomatic of so much of the way the world runs now. That's one of the great things about Shakespeare, he was able to write and articulate a full range of feelings that 400 years later we struggle to even comprehend that he's talking about us. He is, and he's talking about the whole of society. I think Macbeth is very much a parallel to the whole of society and how paranoid society has become.

THE DEADBOLT: Congratulations on the Olivier Award. Is there any way that any of us stateside would ever be able to see the performance?

EJIOFOR: I don't think so. We've done it for an audio book, which will be a very nice package that will have photographs from the production, but there's no sort of official recording. There's an archival recording, but it's very hard to record theater without it looking slightly naff. And one doesn't want that to be the legacy of the show - slightly dodgy audio in a recording. I remember seeing recordings of my plays in school and I was astounded. I thought I had done a pretty good job and then you put the tape in and you're just horrified by what you're watching back - "I put people through that?" And then you realize later on that it might have something to do with the quality of the recording.

THE DEADBOLT: Did you struggle at all with the rhythms of the Mamet dialogue? It doesn't seem quite as pronounced now as it did earlier in his career, but everyone's always making such a big deal of his very careful rhythms - you can't miss a single ellipsis. Is he the same way still, very rigid with his dialogue and his pauses?

EJIOFOR: No, he's not really, but this text didn't have a lot of that, really. There are a lot of things happening. The plot is moving forward at such a pace that it wasn't a piece that was that kind. David's right to not do it that way. It wasn't a piece that runs as a retrospective of the Mamet ideology. It's a thing in its own right. And, in many ways, a new thing, although there are still hints of the old thing. It's brand-new but it doesn't forget its roots. He's just writing from the heart. I'm glad of that, in a sense, that I wasn't reading a "Glengarry Glen Ross in the fight world." I was excited by the fact that it was something completely new.

THE DEADBOLT: Several times the production notes repeat, "This is not a martial arts movie. This is not a martial arts movie." I'll admit that when I tell people about the movie, I've struggled to explain it because I don't want to pin it as a martial arts movie. So, what do you tell people Redbelt is about?

EJIOFOR: I guess I tell people that it's - in that classic actor way - about a Jiu-Jitsu instructor... [laughs] Hamlet is about this soldier who works for Fortinbrass... [laughs] I say it's about a martial artist, an instructor in Los Angeles who gets involved in the film industry while trying to keep a code of ethics and realizes that those two things are hard to combine. That's one way, but it is kind of harsh on the film business.

THE DEADBOLT: What kind of research did you do into martial arts?

EJIOFOR: I just trained. You read a script and you sort of sit back and think, "How am I going to prepare for this?" But this one was obvious. It was obvious that I had to have a muscular response to the dialogue and character. I have to know what he knows, even if I can't implement as well as he can. So we had a few months. People say, "A few months? Martial arts take years." And it does. It takes a long, long time to get any good at it. At the same time, the advantage that actors have is that you have access to the best people in the world, as I did on this project. And you work one-on-one and you have as much time as you need. So, where somebody can study Jiu-Jitsu for two years - and what they mean by that is that they go in on a Tuesday and Friday for an hour and a half with twenty other people - I was training every day, hours on end with a one-on-one instructor who is John Machado or his brother, or Renato Magno or Roger Gracie. It's these guys who are THE guys of Jiu-Jitsu. So, there's a sense that you're getting a level of education that means in a small space of time you can psychologically understand where they're coming from. It might take a long time to get under the psychology of it. Even though you might be more grounded in the moves over a long period of time, I was able to catch up to the philosophies quicker.

In the Ring with Chiwetel Ejiofor Page 2