‘We can tell our stories better than anyone else’

I am curious about you, Iyke. From engineering to acting. How did that happen?Engineering is just something I studied. Acting is my life. It’s me. It’s what I breathe. It’s what I am. So how did acting start for you?It started from way back. My mum said I gave her a lot of trouble right […]

I am curious about you, Iyke. From engineering to acting. How did that happen?
Engineering is just something I studied. Acting is my life. It’s me. It’s what I breathe. It’s what I am.

So how did acting start for you?
It started from way back. My mum said I gave her a lot of trouble right from the womb. When she was dancing, I would kick, when she was watching music or dancing I would kick. So it started from way back because it shows I have always loved it. And then I started acting in church. My love for the arts is something I couldn’t control. When others were busy playing football or doing other things, I would be acting, going around trying to rehearse. At some points, I would miss my tests but I wasn’t bothered because I was going with my passion.

So how did you end up in the engineering class to start with?
You know, when you get to Senior Secondary One, you had to choose between the Arts and the Sciences, and knowing that I was one of the brilliant students in the class, and most of the brilliant guys were going into the Science class, and being someone who enjoyed the Arts, if I had gone into the Arts class they would have laughed at me. So I joined the sciences and started struggling. Every time I go home my dad would say I want you to be an engineer. So I didn’t have much of a choice then. I said fine, let me go with it. And my friends in the sciences were going about with big books and I thought it was kind of cool. That was how I ended up in the sciences, studying electrical engineering. But later on I realised that was not who I am. When I discovered that I just had to move over to be who I really am.

Do you practice any engineering now or is it strictly the arts?
Strictly the arts. I don’t even know where my engineering certificate is now. (Laughs). Seriously, no disrespect to the engineers out there, but honestly I don’t know where my certificate is. I am sure it would be so dusty if I find it somewhere in a pile of papers. Now it is strictly entertainment.

And how rewarding has it been for you?
Very, very rewarding. At first, it wasn’t easy. It is always challenging especially if you don’t have a foundation or someone standing for you. The first thing I get from this is happiness. I have jobs coming in from every part of the country, people saying I’ve watched your movie and it changed my life. That is reward for me. I don’t want to equate reward with money because for me the reward is the happiness and I also present on TV and when I do my show, people also get entertained, so it’s amazing.

And you are also into modelling…
Yes, I am into modelling.

Which one do you prefer acting or modelling?
I think acting is the foundation for me. I enjoy acting the most. Modelling is a by the way thing. I do it for the fashionistas out there. But acting is what I breathe.

What would you say are the challenges of modelling in Nigeria now?
Trying to get a good modelling outfit, a good agency to back you up and take you to where things are happening. There are  lots of them out there who are only after your money so you just need to get a good agency that will push you out there and get jobs for you. And you have to keep yourself in shape, have the right physique and all that.

I was going to ask about body building and keeping in shape, building up and occasionally putting on weight according to the demands of the trade. How do you cope with that?
It is very challenging, especially for entertainers. We keep fit all the time. We look trim all the time and ensure that your muscles are in the right places. And for the ladies, they have to ensure they are on top of their shape and all that. Because that is what the designers are looking for. You can’t be out of shape and expect a designer or a brand to pick you up.

Talking about keeping in shape, for an actor especially, when you look at Hollywood for instance, a movie like “The Last Samurai” in which Tom Cruise had to work for four years, keeping in shape, learning the martial arts and all that. How challenging are roles in Nollywood as compared to this?
You know, Hollywood works with big budget. They could work on a single movie for years. When you have a character, they could give you a year to build yourself into that character physically, emotionally and mentally. But we don’t work with such budgets here. An actor in Hollywood could work on one movie in a year and make enough money to last him five to six years but you don’t have that here. We don’t have big companies coming in and it is only recently that you have the government coming in to support Nollywood. You only have producers coming in with three to four million to produce a movie and they will tell you they have to shoot under a week because they want to recoup their money as soon as possible so you don’t have actors building themselves into characters. If you go behind the scene and ask questions, they could tell you they just got the script today. But if you have time to work on the character then you can come up with really believable characters. I think that’s one of the challenges we face in the industry.

In line with this, what would you say was the most challenging role you have played so far?
The most challenging role is Sammy in the movie Broken, which got me a nomination for best actor award at . . . It was a really challenging role for me because I played the character of a man who was abandoned from age five, born into a broken home and having to learn how bad life is from the street. After wrapping up shooting on the movie, it took me about a year to come off that character. I went through a whole lot to be that character. We went to an orphanage to speak with orphans, we went to rehab to know what life is like there because that is the character I am meant to play.

Interestingly that is your breakout role. Considering the work you put into it, do you feel satisfied with your performance and output?
There is always room for improvement. When you sit down to watch it, you would think oh, I should have done it this way or the other way and sometimes I just laugh at myself. But I can say I am satisfied with my performance there. It may not be 100 per cent, but I’ve calls from all over the world, people telling me they have watched the movie and came close to tears. That showed that we did a good job.
Considering the role you played in Broken, do you think that it is absolutely necessary for movies to have morals or should art just be for art’s sake?
No, it shouldn’t be for art’s sake. We actors have the best tool in the world. We have the media and through this we can teach so many things and not just to entertaining people, to crack them up and make them laugh. The movie Broken talks about child trafficking, and all that. We took up that topic and decided  to preach on it because you can’t go from house to house to ask people to abstain from premarital sex which can result in unwanted pregnancy. We should use the media to teach. Every movie I see, at the end I ask myself what should I take away from it. So it should educate and teach something.
How often do you watch the movies you feature in?
(Laughs) Actually I don’t like watching myself. It is only recently that I have started watching some of my movies or my show on TV because that is the only way I can better myself and know what to work on. I didn’t’ like it before but now I do it every day so I can improve.

Let’s talk about Nollywood now. The beginning was uncertain and now it is big and everybody is rushing into it. Where do you see Nollywood going from here?
It is one of the biggest film industry in the world right now. I want to give thumbs up to everyone who stood by Nollywood from the scratch. I see Nollywood becoming the best in the world because we have amazing directors, we have talented scriptwriters, we have beautiful actors. All we need is a very good platform and money. People should come and invest in Nollywood. The government is trying now because if the government and people out there identify with Nollywood I see Nollywood becoming the best there is. I see it employing more labour because you can imagine how many people work on a set. We can do more and take more people off the street.

If Nollywood is to be the best in the world, what do you think needs to be done?
Let me speak of individuals like cinematographers, actors and directors sponsoring themselves abroad to go and train because they want to be better at what they are doing. So what we are doing right now is with the little knowledge we have. If we attend the best film schools in the world, I believe we will do better than we are doing now. For Nollywood to be the best in the world, we should invest more on training professionals in the industry, send some of them on scholarship to places like the New York Film academy and so on. Let’s go there and learn more.

There is more collaboration now between mainstream Nollywood and other aspects like Kannywood and the Yoruba film makers where you have mainstream Nollywood actors featuring in Hausa films for instance and vice versa. And you also have collabos with Hollywood as well. How do you see this collabos benefiting the industry?
It’s a good one because we are all rubbing off on each other. We are having a bond. One of the movie I saw recently had some Hollywood stars coming to feature in it. You have directors and actors working together, sharing ideas, it leads to growth. When you have those professionals come to work together, they are teaching something, you are gaining from them. Even the collaboration with Kannywood, the Yoruba movies and all the others, it’s fostering unity and helping the industry grow. It helps us to produce better movies. It is positive and it is working to our advantage.

But when you look at a film like Half of a Yellow Sun, one of the criticism has been that they should have given Nigerian actors the lead roles because elsewhere, if the Americans are producing a film set in England, for instance, they give the lead roles to Britons.
I have heard that from some people. When I went to watch the movie at the cinema some people were saying why must you bring someone else to play the lead roles, to tell our own story, we can tell our story better than anyone. It boils down to the director, it boils down to the producer. I don’t know why they brought a foreigner to do our story but the director calls the shot and knows what’s best and he felt that person was better for that role. I think we could have done it better but we had our own actors playing peripheral roles and mangling the pronouncements of the names and got Nigerians wondering why we are doing this. But I think it is trying to bridge the gap between Hollywood and Nollywood, trying to foster unity. I was talking to a producer and he said speaking from a producer’s point of view, if you want Hollywood to identify with your work, you have to have a number of them featuring in it.

What’s your thought on the new Nollywood as opposed to the old Nollywood everyone is used to? I am referring to the works the likes of Kunle Afolayan and co are doing.
We have some fresh directors coming on board and you have some of the old ones who don’t work on themselves. The kind of movies you see now are far better than the old ones. Some Nigerians will tell you I don’t go to the cinema to watch Nollywood movies because they exaggerate a lot. Someone just gets in the car and starts driving and driving. Those things are uncalled for. But the new Nollywood is trying to do things properly, they are trying to update movie production in the country and everyone can go to the cinema and enjoy them. With the old Nollywood, you have a lot of issues, from the characters to makeup. And sometimes they want to play on your intelligence as if the people watching the movies are fools. But I will give kudos to the people who started Nollywood, because they started it as crude as it was and now we are trying to take it a notch higher.

I want to ask you about the power of the marketers who decide which actor should feature in any movie, sometimes forcing actors on directors when they don’t have a role to play in the movie. How much damage or good is that doing to Nollywood?
This is where the new Nollywood becomes all the more important because traditionally what the marketer does is that he calls you and tell you if this person is not in the movie I am not going to market the movie. The director or casting director doesn’t have much say in the matter. We kept seeing the same faces on the screen and it became boring. Most actors, no matter how good they are, found themselves out of job. Now all we don’t need faces to sell movies, we just need good actors because we have internet platforms. We have Doobox and IrokoTv and the rest of them where you can screen your movies and get your returns so producers don’t need to rely on marketers all that much who will tell you this is how it has to be. That’s why Nigerians are happy to go to the cinema now to watch our movies because things have changed. The standard has improved; the prop, the acting even our plot lines.

Your parents wanted you to be an engineer and an entertainer and now you are an actor. What has been their reaction?
When I first called them to tell them this is what I want to do, they said it’s supposed to be a hobby not a career. They didn’t see it from my perspective. They didn’t see the commercial aspect of it, they just thought it was something you do to make people laugh. They kept asking questions and even I had to ask myself some of these questions when I set out, when things were tough. I asked myself, is this how I am going to pay the bills? Is this how I am going to build a house? Feed a family when I get one? Have a good life? But the important thing was my happiness and this is what makes me happy so I stuck to it. My parents want the best for me and now they call me to ask if I am on set today, or if I am on location (laughs).
Who else is calling you to find out if you are on set? Who is the special person?
(Laughs) Well… my friends and family, my siblings. They are always asking me if I am doing well. I know where you are going to (laughs) but right now I am in a relationship with my career now. My career is a lady and I am loving her.