Chiwetel Ejiofor: ‘Love Actually is inescapable’

One of the finest character actors of his generation, Chiwetel Ejiofor has been directed, over the course of his career, by some of the finest directors of theirs. Steven Spielberg instructed him in Amistad, Stephen Frears in Dirty Pretty Things, while he received an Oscar nomination for his role in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. (Richard Curtis has also cried out “Action!” to him. We’ll come to that.)

Now, in Backrooms, he is being directed by a 20-year-old British-American YouTuber known online as Kane “Pixels” (real name Kane Parsons), who has never made a film before. “Yes, but he’s very technically gifted,” Ejiofor says.

Clearly. Backrooms emerged out of a series of horror-adjacent shorts Parsons began filming for the online platform at the age of 14, each revolving around so-called “liminal spaces”. These first started gaining traction, the internet will tell you, “on 4chan as a creepypasta describing an infinite maze of yellow rooms with a distinctive smell and fluorescent hum”.

Excuse me, what now?

“Creepypasta”, it turns out, is a “uniquely internet-native form of horror”. This is Parsons’ happy place. His videos have amassed more than 72 million views. You learn something everyday. Ejiofor certainly did.

“No, I wasn’t aware of its YouTube existence previously, either,” he tells me over video from California, “but I had heard something about those liminal spaces, how they were becoming an area of interest amongst online communities, and I knew that it had something to do with horror.” It was only after meeting Parsons, he adds, “that I fell down the rabbit hole into his world”. And what does he make of it? “Oh, it’s completely fascinating – and terrifying, of course.”

Backrooms – which unfolds ostensibly as a pretty traditional horror flick – is indeed terrifying. These backrooms are parallel worlds in which nothing good can ever happen, and into which people invariably go missing. Their stories are subsequently told via “found-footage”, which purports to give them the tang of authenticity.

If it seems unlikely that Parsons’ YouTube efforts, impressive as they were, would then morph into a proper film, then it isn’t without precedent. Back in 1999, the world’s biggest movie was The Blair Witch Project, made by film students on a micro budget and shot exclusively with handheld cameras. Backrooms arrives with similar intent, but with a $10 million budget and a major star in the lead role.

Ejiofor plays Clark, a frustrated middle-aged man in suburban America at some undefined point in the 1980s. He works in a failing furniture store, where something funny is happening with the electrics. It’s while investigating the fusebox that Clark falls through the wall and into one of these “liminal spaces”, an Escher-like world in which staircases lead nowhere, and doors open to nothing. Sinister things lurk behind every corner, and so Clark runs. But is he being pursued by monsters, or merely his own imagination?

It all plays out like something the late film-maker David Lynch might have admired, tying itself in such increasingly surreal knots – hello, dwarf by the lamp; hello, edible stomach – that the viewer is left wondering what on Earth is going on? I ask Ejiofor what it all means.

He gives a hesitant grin. “Well, it’s definitely open to interpretation, and there is clearly not just one way of looking at it. It’s about thoughts, and about memory, places, the reorganisation of the way that you think, and the way that you are in certain spaces, your patterns of behaviour – as well as, you know, just as a metaphor.”

That settles it, then: he’s no clearer on it than the rest of us.

Ejiofor was born in south east London in 1977, one of four children. His parents were immigrants from Nigeria, his father a doctor, his mother a pharmacist. When he was 11 years old, during a trip back to Lagos, he and his father were involved in a car crash. Ejiofor was thrown from the car and badly injured – the scars are still visible across his forehead and arms – while his father was killed.

At school, he gravitated towards drama, and it was while studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts that he landed a part in Spielberg’s Amistad. Drama students are rarely quite so fortunate so swiftly. He must have been exceptional?

He shrugs. “I feel like I’m living a life that is far beyond any sort of expectation I had for it, but I knew that I deeply loved this work, and I loved the exploration it allowed me to do. Acting is a form of self-exploration, right?” he says. “Also, I was excited about being able to do something artistic in which you didn’t have to expose yourself in a way that you would with music, poetry or writing.”

This is a pertinent point. Ejiofor is a highly private individual – the 48-year-old has elected to blur his background so that I can gauge precisely nothing of his surroundings, but merely focus on his handsome face and the sky blue shirt he’s wearing. He has become adept at deflecting personal enquiry, and can answer questions with great eloquence while giving away virtually nothing. When I ask, for example, how being directed by both Spielberg and Kane Parsons compares, he answers with the diplomacy of politician.

“What you want from your director is a complete understanding of the world they’re creating, and that’s what’s so incredible about Kane. Sure, he’s 20 years old, but he has spent so much of his young life creating this very particular world. He’s probably the only person on Earth who could tell this story, in this way.”

Such resistance to reveal very much at all clearly pays off in a professional sense. He remains something of an enigma, and so you never know quite who he is going to be from one film to the next. Thus, he is as convincing as a furniture salesman in the grip of an existential crisis in Backrooms as he was a hunky schoolteacher in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Which does he prefer?

“I don’t think about it in those terms,” he says. “They’re different experiences. Each has its own meaning.”

Ejiofor does a romantic lead rather well. He played another one 20 years previously, in Richard Curtis’s deathless Love Actually, perhaps the most Marmite movie of all time. “It’s inescapable, that film, every year between Christmas and Valentine’s Day,” he says. “But then, I love that. It’s has a lot of optimism to it, and that’s the critical thing, I think. It’s about hope.”

Life changed after his 2013 Oscar nomination. Now he was above-the-title famous, a tricky position for him. He was recognised everywhere, and routinely papped. Google will tell you that he is currently in a relationship with Sacha Bertagnon, a “professional pet groomer and entrepreneur” from New York, and that the couple recently had a baby. I am not permitted to ask personal questions – it would take a second to kick me off our video call – so instead I wonder how he manages to keep the professional and personal apart.

“Well, my north star has always been the work. I have no interest in the qualities of fame, because there is nothing I can take from fame and put back into the work. It’s not like I’m making films about being well known. That wouldn’t be very psychologically fulfilling.”

So he’s found an equable work-life balance, has he? He thinks for a moment, then shrugs. “It’s a good question. My work-life balance is not fabulous at the moment, no, because I’ve become more involved in the work, and it’s become harder to disassociate myself from it.”

And why is that? “Well, I always feel that there is more work to be done, more interesting spaces to enter, and more creativity to mine. So my desire is to just carry on. I’m on a journey,” he says, and now he frowns, “searching for… something.”

‘Backrooms’ is in cinemas from Friday