Interview: Chiwetel Ejiofor on Rob Peace’s Tragic True Story
ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Academy Award nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor about his second directorial effort, Rob Peace. Ejiofor discussed the film’s tragic true story, its themes, and similarities to his first film as a director. It is out only in theaters on August 16, 2024.
“Directed, adapted by, and starring Academy Award nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave), 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 (Academy Award nominee Mary J. Blige, Mudbound), Rob risks everything he has worked for to free his imprisoned father (Ejiofor). Also starring Camila Cabello and based on the New York Times bestseller by Jeff Hobbs,” says the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: I know you’re from England, so I was curious about your read from this, but this felt like a very American story because we see this bright young kid, and we see him go through a lot of trauma, but he gets some wonderful opportunities. Then we also see all the issues that come with the American Dream and America that take that away from him.
Chiwetel Ejiofor: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that that’s what happened. I feel like there’s something that is very universal as well around Rob’s story. I think it’s very specific in the United States. It’s very specifically an American story, but it also speaks to things about social mobility that I think people engage with around the world. It’s the sort of dynamics of family, the responsibility to family, and the responsibility of family to the individual, as well as the responsibilities of an individual to oneself. I think that these things are so human basically, and so fundamental to our humanity.
Jeff Hobbs’ book about his roommate at Yale, I was struck, I think primarily, by the humanism of it. The idea of a person looking at the life of their friend and trying to understand what happened to them in a wider context. Then in investigating Rob’s journey, understanding all of those familial bonds that tie the relationships to family, the relationships to community, the relationships to friends, and what Rob was striving to do in all of those spaces. I thought really had something that connected the experiences in maybe a much more minor key, but because Rob is an extreme version of some of those things. But I felt connected to the experiences of so many people around the world.
I saw some of the discourse around when the book came out, and the takeaway from some people was that Rob had two different lives. Like he was Shaun to one audience and he was Rob to the other. But in your film, I feel like you don’t walk away thinking that. You see a very whole individual, a very complicated person. So I would love to just get your thoughts on this not being a person with two separate lives. It’s just a very complicated person who was forced into making some bad decisions as well.
Yeah, 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. 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.
The real strength, or what was really interesting about Rob to me, was that he was always himself. That he could encapsulate both of these parts of his life, these different and complicated spaces. He could wear his durag in the lab and be a Yale student studying molecular biophysics and biochemistry and be accepted within that context with some struggles, don’t get me wrong, but broadly accepted within that context. Still himself and authentic to himself and authentic to his experiences, and then go back into East Orange, back to his friends, back to his community, and be himself. They recognize him as somebody who’s going to Yale, but is themselves and is always Rob.
I felt like that is true of Rob. It’s authentic of his experience, and that is actually authentic of a lot of the experiences of people who find themselves in these worlds of social mobility. The complications aren’t about code-switching. The complications are about how you navigate and manage the different expectations on you at any different, at different points in your life because of the numerous systemic choices that you are having to make and the numerous pressures that are put on you. In Rob’s case, it’s a pretty extreme example of all of these, but it still highlights the point I think that a lot of people experience.
You’ve directed two films, and there’s a through line of these incredibly gifted and smart Black children who care deeply about their community. This one goes in a much more tragic direction, but what do you like about the shared DNA in these two films?
Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that I really responded to this, these two stories about family ultimately about, about family, about the challenges and, uh, about the responsibilities that individuals find within these dynamics. I think I see myself in these stories a lot. So in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and in Rob Peace, I see elements of my story. Certainly things that kind of triggered a deep and emotional response from me. There are things that I have considered and things that I think about. They’re also things that I think aren’t necessarily depicted in the way that I want to talk about them in cinema. So I feel like there’s a desire to see stories that kind of encapsulate more of a rounded experience of people’s lives, especially within the context of these communities.
I suppose I was moved by feeling that Rob, in this case, was very unfairly treated by the wider sort of media response to the events that occurred. I felt that there was a very sort of judgmental element that was part of how Rob’s story was reported and thought of. I definitely had a desire to sort of see what that looked like once you had a much more three-dimensional understanding of his experiences with the hope that it would encourage a better sort of allyship, a fuller sort of allyship.
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