136 Quotes by Chiwetel Ejiofor

I started, obviously, doing theater, and I always thought that I would; in a way, I always thought that I'd be a theater actor. When I was starting out, I didn't really plan on making films, actually.

As a child, I was just never that interested in the lives of my favourite actors, like Cary Grant. I do wonder whether knowing too much about someone's personal life interrupts an audience's ability to suspend disbelief, to really invest in the characters. My preference would always be that people engage with the work.

I love the theater community and theater life, and would love to figure out the distinctive differences between Broadway and the West End.

I look at scripts really for whether they can be moving or penetrate some kind of truth. You are constantly chasing that feeling as an actor when every part of a production comes together.

I didn't know anything about '12 Years a Slave.' Not the book, not Solomon Northup, which I was quite shocked by, once I'd read it, that it wasn't a seminal text. I think it deserves to be.

I can watch a film, even a film that I've been in, and think, 'I'm not sure, 100 percent, what I think about it.' I'm not sure what I think about what I've done in it.

All roads lead home in the end. You’ve got to keep that in mind always – in your work and in your life.

My father, Arinze Ejiofor, was a musician and a doctor. Nobody’s ever asked me about that combination and what growing up in that environment was like.

A lot of people ask me about my father’s passing when I was young, which I’m never comfortable with. I invariably move around that subject.