David Oyelowo stars as Martin Luther King in new film

David Oyelowo stars as Martin Luther King in new film

Sunday, November 16, 2014 12:47 pm


David Oyelowo

David Oyelowo

David Oyetokunbo Oyelowo, along with Opray Winfrey, is the big star of “Selma,” a powerful new film about civil rights icon Martin Luther King, which premiered in Los Angeles this week. Oyelowo played the role of Martin Luther King, a role he once dreamed of playing seven years ago.

The 38 year-old Oyelowo, who had played a lot of roles in Hollywood films and the theatre was born by Nigerian parents in Oxford, United Kingdom.

Former talk show queen Winfrey plays Annie Lee Cooper, a modest and dignified nurse trying to register to vote but being blocked and humiliated by a small town official.The new film is already being tipped for many awards.

Co-produced by Pathe, Winfrey and Brad Pitt’s Plan B production company, the film has Oyelowo — currently starring in “Interstellar” and soon to be in “A Most Violent Year” — playing King as determined and charismatic, yet human.

The Mail Online said the film has received a standing ovation in Hollywood as industry journal Variety forecast “considerable box-office and awards-season gold.”

“The film, due for limited release on December 25 to qualify for the Oscars, focuses on a short period after the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act, the law that abolished segregation in the US South.

 Director Ava DuVernay (L) and actor David Oyelowo attend the "Selma" first look during the AFI FEST 2014 presented by Audi at the Egyptian Theatre on November 11,

Director Ava DuVernay (L) and actor David Oyelowo attend the “Selma” first look during the AFI FEST 2014 presented by Audi at the Egyptian Theatre on November 11,

(L-R) Actors Ledisi Young, Omar J. Dorsey, Niecy Nash, David Oyelowo, Tessa Thompson, and Common attend the "Selma" first look during the AFI FEST 2014

(L-R) Actors Ledisi Young, Omar J. Dorsey, Niecy Nash, David Oyelowo, Tessa Thompson, and Common attend the “Selma” first look during the AFI FEST 2014

According to Mail Online, The movie opens with a racist bomb attack on a church in Birmingham, Alabama which killed four black schoolgirls, but rapidly turns to Selma, another town in the southern US state known as the cradle of the civil rights struggle.

King — who had already won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 — heads to Selma to lead demonstrations and a celebrated march on the Alabama capital, Montgomery.

The violent clampdown on so-called Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, sparked a national scandal and triggered a movement that forced president Lyndon Johnson to proclaim the Voting Rights Act later that year.

It depicts the US Secret Service’s attempts to trip him up by bugging his conversations, shadowing him and trying to get at him through his wife, Coretta Scott King, played by Carmen Ejogo.

Coretta was in fact harassed by the FBI with anonymous racist threats and also with recordings of her pastor husband allegedly frolicking with other women.

King’s doubts, struggles and disagreements with other civil rights leaders, including Malcolm X and student activists in Selma, are also portrayed in detail.

“David (Oyelowo) is the reason I came on board” the movie, said Oprah Winfrey at the American Film Institute festival in Los Angeles, which wound up Thursday.

She said they had become “fast friends” on the set of “The Butler,” last year’s film by director Lee Daniels which was widely tipped for Oscar glory but in the end failed to earn any nominations.

Oyelowo, of Nigerian origin, said he dreamed in 2007 that he would one day play Martin Luther King.

*Originally reported by Mail Online


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