Carmen Ejogo: Away She Went

Her name may be unfamiliar, but chances are you will have seen or heard Carmen Ejogo. In the 90s, she seesawed between singing vocals for Tricky and presenting Saturday Disney, in between acting in Dennis Potter dramas.

Born in London to a Nigerian father and Scottish mother, Ejogo has, since leaving the UK, carved a career in American film and television, working with Jodie Foster, Edward Norton and her now husband, Jeffrey Wright. While the actress may not be following her spouse as he treads the boards, she did find director Sam Mendes’ theatrical experience beneficial on his road movie Away We Go.

“He’s great because we had a real rehearsal period, and the other thing coming from the stage background is a real reverence for the text: he’s not messing around with it in big ways. He took the project on because he liked what he saw”.

What he saw was the tale of a couple (John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph) on the road to what will hopefully be happiness as first time parents. Ejogo won the role of Rudolph’s sister, which proved more challenging than her short screen time suggested. “What she was doing with her character was going to inform what I was doing with my character. For example, with choosing the accent, I really had to mimic Maya”.

Did she and Mendes bond as Brits abroad? “Living in the states as he does with his family, you really see how culturally different it is, so you definitely seek out other people whose sense of humour and cultural references you’re gonna get. We’d share our love for ska music: people in New York didn’t know what we were talking about!”

Ejogo has mixed feelings about the present situation for British actors in America. “You can have a more comfortable life, but that’s a less satisfying life as an artist. I also found that as a bi-racial actress, roles tend to be very much about your race, there’s a pressure to represent your background. My background is African, not African-American, so I don’t have that baggage that many black people have. I’ve always been more nomadic in my sensibility than America’s allowed me to be in my career. But I’m hoping that in the new Obama age, things will change, because the image you see of America isn’t necessarily representative of the progress the country’s trying to make”.