OPRAH WINFREY HELP NIGERIAN BORN-BRITISH ACTOR DAVID OYELOWO FULFILL A SEVEN-YEAR DREAM TO PORTRAY MARTIN LUTHER KING ON THE BIG SCREEN.
Oprah Winfrey used tough
love to help British actor David Oyelowo fulfil a seven-year dream to portray
Martin Luther King on the big screen.
Oyelowo tells me how he
played Oprah a video of himself reciting Dr King’s ‘I’ve been to the
mountaintop’ speech, delivered the day before the civil rights leader was
assassinated in 1968.
‘I showed Oprah this
tape and she said: “I can see it — but you haven’t got there yet. You’re going
to have to go deeper. But I can see it.” ’
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Scene from the movie ‘Selma’:
David Oyelowo, centre, as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Carmen Ejogo, right, as
Coretta Scott King
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After she’d watched it,
Oprah looked him in the eye and told him: ‘I want you to realise that dream.’
Years later, Oyelowo
looked at the video again and realised she’d been right.
‘I wouldn’t have cast me
as Martin Luther King back then. King was at the centre of one of the most
volatile times in American history, and he was burdened by expectation. Oprah
couldn’t see that burden in my face... then. I’ve lived a lot of life since.’
The movie, which opens
here on February 6, is directed with passionate urgency by Ava DuVernay, and
charts how King helped orchestrate marches in 1965 from Selma, Alabama, to the
state capital of Montgomery. It also shows how he used his intellectual savvy
to incite racists in Selma into committing violence against blacks — on camera.
culled from dailymail.co.uk
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