Chiwetel Ejiofor Breaks Down How He Masters Dialects in Movie Roles

From the Doctor Strange and Venom franchises to award-nominated fare like 12 Years a Slave and Children of Men, Chiwetel Ejiofor has accumulated a pretty unique filmography. Later this week, the actor can be seen directing, adapting, and starring in the upcoming movie Rob Peace, and it sounds like it will be the latest unique display of his talents. While speaking to ComicBook about his work on Rob Peace, Ejiofor shared a bit of insight into how he approaches one part of performing — his accent work.

“I don’t know,” Ejiofor explained in our interview, which you can check out above. “I have a dialect coach who I’ve worked with for a very long time, Jerome Butler. Basically, I work with him on every project that I do, that isn’t in a way very close to my own natural accent. And because he’s so thorough and we’ve worked together for so long, we’re in a kind of pattern of how we approach accents and wanting to be as authentic as possible. To go and find people that I wanna sort of sound like, and talk to people and engage with people and try to get as authentic an experience as possible. So I find that process, actually, really really fun. I think it’s changed over time, but only in the sense that as I’ve worked with him more closely, I’ve found that I’ve just been able to structure that work in a slightly different way. I found it was more challenging when I was trying to do it myself and just sort of trying to sort of corner people and get them to speak into a microphone. I love that process.”

What Is Rob Peace About?

Rob Peace follows the true story of a brilliant young man (Jay Will) torn between his father’s shadowed past and his own promising future. Raised by his devoted mother (Mary J. Blige), Rob risks everything he has worked for to free his imprisoned father (Ejiofor). Rob Peace also stars Camila Cabello, and is based on the New York Times bestseller by Jeff Hobbs.

“I think I didn’t wanna make a film about code-switching because I actually find the term code-switching and what it evokes actually to be quite limiting, especially when it’s applied to the experiences of Black people,” Ejiofor explained in a recent interview with Yahoo! “It’s become a term that has been used to describe in a shorthand way some sort of racialized dynamic, which I just think is minimizing. So I wasn’t interested in that. Rob never represented that as far as I could see, so yeah, some people sort of jumped on that. He went to Yale, but he was from this impoverished kind of area. Consequently, it’s a story about these two, and to me that never rang true to me.”

Rob Peace arrives in theaters on Friday, August 16th.