Chiwetel Ejiofor

Chiwetel Ejiofor is one of the best British actors of his generation. He should be a star striker yet he is treated like a utility player.

Angelina Jolie’s sleek and very enjoyably absurd action thriller Salt is out this Friday. One of its incidental pleasures is the appearance of the British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays a tough, shrewd CIA agent. Ejiofor is an excellent performer, whose mere presence adds sinew and depth to a film – and yet I can’t help feeling a bit restless, when I see the middling film roles that he’s getting these days. The one in Salt, for example, is all right … but hardly a stretch. He’s one of those actors who made a brilliant start 10 years ago, but is now developing a rather samey line in solid-as-a-rock character roles in American movies with an American accent.

Well, there’s certainly nothing to object to in Ejiofor’s Olivier-winning career as an actor, and it’s arguably naive to complain, because a professional actor has to make a living in the real world and make the parts he’s getting come alive. This Ejiofor unquestionably does. But he’s one of those performers who, infuriatingly, isn’t blazing on screen the way I thought he would at the beginning of the last decade. He is treated like a utility player, when he should be a star striker.

Recently, I blogged about the deeply dismaying form shown by Eric Bana, who made a sensational debut in Chopper (2000), but has more or less settled for blandness ever since. Perhaps even more exasperating is Naomi Watts who first captured everyone’s attention with her stunningly clever and sexy performance in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), and now always seems to be cast, boringly and superciliously, as the dishy-yet-brainy-yet-plausibly-normal older-ish female lead.

Ejiofor is sailing uncomfortably close to the doldrums with these utilitarian roles. It’s not, I think, a question of being marginalised as a black man, but as a highly competent and intelligent Brit who can do a first-class accent, is a strong and compelling presence and, perhaps, won’t break the budget with his fee.

Ejiofor has been in Spike Lee’s fantastically silly thriller Inside Man (2006), in Roland Emmerich’s uproarious disaster epic 2012 (2009), in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster (2007). Each time, he’s been fine. More interesting movies have been Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), Julian Jarrold’s quirky comedy Kinky Boots (2005) and Joss Whedon’s sci-fi thriller Serenity (2005). But I have to say that for me none of them have the potency of that movie which first brought Ejiofor to general notice: Stephen Frears’s deeply strange and fascinating thriller Dirty Pretty Things (2002), where he plays a Nigerian doctor and illegal immigrant in the UK, forced to work as a hotel porter, who discovers something very disturbing about Britain’s globalised service economy. Ejiofor made a ferociously powerful impression, his handsomeness poignantly given reality and vulnerability by a curling scar on his forehead. His platonic relationship with Audrey Tautou was viscerally intense and yet romantic. Since then, despite never being anything less than a first-rate performer, Ejiofor has never quite packed a punch as hard as that in Dirty Pretty Things.

It’s not a criticism of him – it’s a criticism of something short-sighted in the business which won’t respond fully to his star quality. Chiwetel Ejiofor should be up there at the Russell Crowe level, but annoyingly for his fans, like me, he’s not. Or not yet. Perhaps if he could get an action lead, that would shake things up. As it is, he’s doing these respectable middleweight supporting roles. It could be that he will further explore his glittering stage career, or that he will end up being offered some hugely lucrative small-screen role, maybe as a maverick cop in CSI Vegas or CSI San Diego or CSI Seattle and that filmgoers will see less and less of him. I hope not. Perhaps a screenwriter like Peter Morgan or Steven Knight can create a juicy, starry, massive lead role especially for Ejiofor, one of the most brilliant, yet underused British actors of his generation.