David Oyelowo: From saint to psycho

David Oyelowo stars in the movie Nightingale.

The star of Martin Luther King film Selma talks to Russell Baillie about going solo in his latest film.

In his last movie David Oyelowo played a man who said "I have a dream". In his next one, he's playing a guy who is his own worst nightmare

The British actor portrayed Dr Martin Luther King in Selma. It was his highest American profile role since the Brit crossed the Atlantic after his run on UK spy series Spooks.

Oyelowo was widely acclaimed for his portrayal of the civil rights leader and won a Golden Globe best actor nomination - but not an Oscar one. His and the film's apparent snub by the Academy Awards set off a media debate about diversity in Hollywood.

Speaking from Los Angeles half a year later from the furore, Oyelowo is unperturbed by Selma's Oscar shut-out.

"I am very philosophical about it because the thing that is very apparent, that after all of that hullabaloo, is that films are for life, not just for award seasons. The film has gone on to have such an incredible impact in so many different places and in so many so many countries ... "

"America is in one of his most turbulent times in history again and that film has been a beacon of hope - a place to see how things were in the past and how they are now. And how you can juxtapose the two."

"To be perfectly frank, the lack of Oscar nominations got the film more attention than the film would have done and the film continues to go further and wider than maybe we anticipated. So I am able to be very joyful about the continued life of that film."

Selma paid off for Oyelowo in other ways. On the morning the Oscar nominations came out, Selma producer Brad Pitt finally took a look at Nightingale, the low-budget but high intensity one-man movie Oyelowo had made the year before and had struggled to get a foothold on the festival circuit.

Impressed, Pitt championed the film. HBO picked it up.

"Gigantic billboards of my great big head were all over the country," laughs the actor about the cable network's push behind a film Oyelowo thought might at best end up in few cinemas in Los Angeles and New York and on DVD.

The film's screenplay, by Frederick Mensch, had featured on The Black List, a website with a database of unproduced scripts, before producer Josh Weinstock and director Elliott Lester picked it up and cast Oyelowo in the solo lead role.

He plays Peter Snowden, a man who is virtually housebound and unravelling mentally as he makes preparations for the visit of an old army buddy.

He spends much of his time talking into a video camera, on the phone or shouting at his mother in her bedroom up the hall.

There's barely a shot in the entire film without the increasingly unnerving Oyelowo in it. The actor stayed in character for the entirety of the 3-week single-location shoot and stayed away from his family.

"I didn't do that because it's something I would normally do, I did that because it just felt with the character it was necessary to do that.

Oyelowo says his character is exhibiting signs of dissociative identity disorder, or what was once called multiple personality disorder.

"I actually broke it down to seven different iterations of him and if you have seven different iterations of one guy and you are the only in a movie you really don't want to mix yourself in there as well and I certainly didn't want that guy anywhere near my family.

"He was a pretty tricky role to shake off. He was someone having a perpetual internal dialogue which the audience is having a glimpse into and that is a very real reverberating sound around your head when you have stay in it for three weeks."

Nightingale is certainly a showcase for Oyelowo as an actor. Was he wanting to prove something? Did ego come into it?

"It's quite the opposite. For me it's incredibly exposing because if you fail at this kind of a showcase you fail big.

"One of the things you never truly know as an actor until you do it, especially on screen, is do you have the ability to hold an audience's attention in the way only a leading man can - that is not something that can be taught and you find out by doing it .

"For me this was the first opportunity to do that. It was a big pendulum swing, because until then I had been playing mostly supporting roles but to go from that to be the only guy it was like: 'Ok nailing my colours to the mast. Let's see how this goes'.

"It wasn't an ego thing for me. I truly didn't know if I could do it."

It's now been seen by more than two million viewers, and there's talk of Oyelowo as an Emmy contender.

"For me the greatest award I could get for Nightingale I have already got - for it to be airing on HBO, and talking to you in New Zealand about this tiny film, shot in LA nearly two years ago.

"No trinkets are going to surpass that, in terms of what that film has achieved."

Who: David Oyelowo
What: Nightingale
Where and when: SoHo, Monday July 6 9.30pm; Sunday July 12, 8.30pm
Also: Selma is now out on DVD

- TimeOut