The Extreme, Apocalyptic Way Chiwetel Ejiofor Recovered From '12 Years a Slave'

Chiwetel Ejiofor with his BAFTA Award in 2014 (AP)

After suffering through the hellish gauntlet that was the production of 12 Years a Slave, Chiwetel Ejiofor need a break. And so he retreated — counterintuitively, perhaps — to an apartment in one of the busiest places in the world: Brooklyn, New York.

“You know it’s been an intense experience when New York is where you come to relax,” the 38-year-old actor recalled in a conversation last week with Yahoo Movies. “I loved it there. I spent three months there to decompress. I didn’t do anything. I just read. I sat in the Starbucks for hours, nursing a coffee and thinking of man’s inhumanity to man,” he added with a laugh.

This was back in 2012, when director Steve McQueen’s movie was still in post-production, and though Ejiofor had by then landed some high-profile roles — including turns in American Gangster and Inside Man — he still wasn’t quite a public figure, and even those who were fans with his work probably struggled a bit with the pronunciation of his name (last time, for the record: it’s pronounced CHOO-it-tell EDGE-ee-oh-for). When he began to feel ready to start taking on new acting projects, the first one that moved him was the post-apocalyptic love-triangle drama Z for Zachariah, which hits theaters on Friday (it originally premiered at Sundance).

Based on the 1974 novel by Robert C. O'Brien, Z for Zachariah is a psychological drama and morality play centered on three strangers — played in the film by Ejiofor, Margot Robbie, and Chris Pine — who are brought together in the wake of a global catastrophe. Ejiofor is a scientist with radiation poisoning who starts a romance with Robbie’s character, a naive farm girl who maintains a remote, Narnia-esque paradise that she’s valiantly trying to keep fertile. The two quickly forge a connection – one that’s soon threatened by the arrival of a new interloper (Pine), who relates to Ann more naturally and begins to threaten her romance with Loomis.

The movie was shot in a majestic forest in the south of New Zealand, in land seemingly untouched by civilization. According to director Craig Zobel (Compliance), the spot was picked to “avoid the crumbling buildings and dusty, trashy grossness” that has filled the landscapes of many of Hollywood’s recent post-apocalyptic projects. But the purity of the land was not matched by the two male protagonists, who begin an increasingly vicious battle for Ann — despite the risk that poses to the future of mankind. “We spent a lot of time thinking about [what one would do if] one was in that situation,” Ejiofor said, “and I don’t know if my conclusions are completely dissimilar to the ones we’re investigating in the film.”

Just as Brooklyn provided a refuge from the rigors of the 12 Years a Slave production, Z for Zachariah ended up offering up an escape from the exhausting ordeal that was the film’s Oscar campaign. As soon as his glad-handing and lobbying duties were largely complete, Ejiofor escaped to New Zealand and the Zachariah set, which was an hour away from even the nearest gas station.

“It was really useful,” he says. “It sort of tuned me in to the sort of silence and reflective part of the story. The peacefulness of New Zealand [helped], as well — of just being out in some remote place, having come from a kind of very definitely hectic scenario. That was kind of illuminating and beautiful.”

Ejiofor had to shuttle back and forth from the set for further 12 Years duties, making for a somewhat disorienting experience. “I came back, spent one day in London for the BAFTAs, flew back to New Zealand and carried on shooting,” he remembered. “Then we wrapped it, and the Oscars were the next day.”

Ejiofor won the BAFTA for Best Actor, earning a standing ovation from cast mate Brad Pitt and other nominees such as Leonardo DiCaprio; the next day, he was working in a fake farmer’s field half a world away. It’s the result of a work ethic he built up after ten years of being mostly a character actor (you may remember him from Love Actually), which has continued since the surge of fame that began in late 2013.

Z for Zachiariah is the first film he’s appeared in that’s gotten any sort of high profile since 12 Years, and he’ll follow it up this fall with Ridley Scott’s sci-fi flick The Martian and Julia Roberts’ crime drama Secrets in Their Eyes. He was at one point rumored to be in a James Bond movie, and while that didn’t work out — he still refuses to comment on it — he will star as villain Baron Mordo in Marvel’s forthcoming film Doctor Strange, which he says will start filming later this year. (The actor is mum on that role, too, but promises “it’s going to be pretty special.”)

In the meantime, Ejiofor will finish up his run of the drama Everyman at the National Theater in London, and then hit the promo trail hard in support of his fall films. And he’ll continue to look for projects like Z for Zachariah, which he says really got under his skin with its study of man’s worst instincts.

“They’re not Machiavellian guys, trying to figure out how to dominate,” he explained. “When there’s more than two people, you have potentially the opportunity of having majority and minority positions. That’s what I really like about the film: It reveals how people end up doing things quite naturalistically, without sitting there and really thinking about it.”