Carmen Ejogo has twice walked many (movie) miles in Coretta Scott King’s stylish shoes. But when she initially portrayed the first lady of civil rights she had not yet met Mrs. King. That was when Ejogo starred opposite Jeffrey Wright in the 2001 HBO movie “Boycott,” which won a Peabody Award.
King “loved it,” says the actress of that first film. She “responded to my performance positively, so I got to meet her and spend time with her — which was really quite an overwhelming experience, actually.”
Her latest opportunity to play King was in the movie “Selma” (now in theaters). In a telephone interview, Ejogo says, “I knew what it was to be in her presence, very immediately, very directly, so that’s definitely there in my performance.” She had a “stillness and the ability to move someone to tears — which is what she did to me without saying a word.”
King had earned that stature as the wife, and then widow, of the civil rights champion, the mother of their four children and a human rights advocate in her own right. She died in 2006 at age 78.
Ejogo, who played a struggling single mother in “The Purge: Anarchy,” as well as Tyler Perry’s wife in “Alex Cross” and Whitney Houston’s divorced, sultry daughter in “Sparkle,” was born outside the United States. So were her “Selma” co-stars David Oyelowo (as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.), Tom Wilkinson (President Lyndon Baines Johnson) and Tim Roth (Alabama Gov. George Wallace).
“I wasn’t really beholden to some kind of iconic or mythological representation of Martin or Coretta that you often do find in history books in the classroom,” says Ejogo, a Londoner turned New Yorker. “They’re usually two-dimensional; they don’t really get into the psychology of what made these people tick. They certainly don’t get very heavily into the fragility or the doubtful sides of these leaders. You usually just hear about the heroics and assume that they were born that way, born into the ability to lead.”
The actress continues, “Martin was asked to be the leader of the civil rights movement when the bus boycott was happening in 1955. He and Coretta had no intentions or desires, necessarily, to be put in that position. It was thrust upon them.” Ejogo found it helpful to know they sometimes struggled with their roles.
Coretta, she says, “at times was frustrated by her marriage and by being put in the position of first lady when it meant that she couldn’t be the progressive feminist, musician, singer, intellect (or) academic (she had hoped to become). … She just had to sort of stand by her man — and behind her man — most of the time.” Being able to reveal that limitation, she adds, “was the only reason I was interested in playing the character a second time.”
She didn’t just want to tread familiar ground, but no one could have foreseen the contentious climate in which ‘Selma’ would open. The film arrived in theaters at about the time protesters went into the streets in response to the killings by police officers of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and others.
Ejogo says, “It’s tragic to think that the film is still, in terms of subject matter, something we’re grappling with as a country. But it’s also exciting that a film like this has come out in this moment, because I really, strongly believe that, when you leave (the theater), you come out feeling uplifted and inspired. You … see that civil disobedience can actually work.”
As she sees it, today’s divisions are partly rooted in disproportionate distribution of wealth and power. “People are feeling like the little man is getting littler and littler,” she says, “and authority feels more and more oppressive. That goes beyond the race issue.”
There are always people on the wrong side of history that you have to stand up to, she says, and “Selma” serves as a reminder that it can be done successfully. She considers that “a hopeful and positive message to be disseminating at a time like this, when people are … taking to the streets, sometimes for the first time, and trying to find their voice and trying to be on the right side of history and trying to make a statement.”
While working on “Boycott,” the actress visited some of the real-life “Selma” locations, but still found it a stirring experience, while making the new film, to stand on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where marchers were assaulted by state troopers with dogs and billy clubs.
“A lot of the extras in that scene had been there in the original march, and had been there on Bloody Sunday and lived through this,” she says. “So it was a really visceral and emotional and exciting experience. So many of those people were grateful that the struggle they’d been through was now being documented and being remembered and being put on the screen.”
