Omotola's Sunday Telegraph's Stella Magazine feature is now online -
written by Ben Arogundade. Find the full interview below...
Omosexy': The biggest film star you’ve never heard of
Omotola Jalade Ekeinde, aka 'Omosexy’,
is the queen of Nollywood. She’s appeared in more than 300 films, pulls
in 150 million viewers for her reality-television show and has been
named one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
She scores a zero on the Hollywood Richter scale. She has never starred in a major motion picture. Her most recent film, Last Flight to Abuja, means nothing to devotees of Netflixand LoveFilm.
When she sat next to Steven Spielberg at a Time magazine
dinner earlier this year he didn’t know her name. Yet Omotola Jalade
Ekeinde was attending that dinner because, like him, she had been
honoured in Time’s 2013 list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.
Alongside Kate Middleton, Michelle Obama and Beyoncé.The star of
more than 300 films, Omotola – or “Omosexy”, as she is known to her
legions of fans – is bigger across the African diaspora than Halle
Berry.
Her reality-television show, Omotola: The Real Me, pulls
in more viewers than Oprah’s and Tyra’s at their peak, combined, and
she is the first African celebrity ever to amass more than one million
Facebook “likes”.
When I meet her for the interview in a photographic studio in south-east
London she is still recovering from getting mobbed by her
Afro-Caribbean fan base in a nearby Tesco. “They practically had to shut
down the store when people recognised me,” she says. “I actually got
scared.”
Omotola is one of the biggest stars in Nollywood,
the low-budget, high-output Nigerian film industry that churns out more
English-language films than Hollywood or Bollywood (1,000-2,000 a
year). Some have cinematic releases, but most are for the
straight-to-video market.
When I watch her Stella photo-shoot
from the sidelines it is immediately apparent that everything about her
is BIG. Big body, big hair, big personality, big laugh: she comes across
like Oprah’s sister.
She is here with her own film crew, who are
recording for a future episode of her television show. Which means there
is also a big, superstar delay – three hours – before our interview can
start.
Many of her fans think her real name is “Omosexy”, she tells
me, laughing, when we finally get to speak, but it was a nickname given
to her by her husband, an airline pilot.
“He bought me a car back
in 2009, and that was the plate number,” she recalls, speaking with
kinetic, girlish excitement, rattling off sentences in fast, extended
flurries.
"All my cars have special plate numbers, like Omotola
1.” When I ask how many cars she has, she laughs again, with
embarrassment. “A few.” When she first saw her personalised licence
plate she was horrified. “I thought, 'Oh no!’ It sounded cocky.
As
if I was telling everybody, 'I’m sexy!’ Y’know-wha-I-mean?” She
punctuates her sentences with this phrase, which she reels off as a
single word.
The 35-year-old star has been acting since she was
16. Most recently she starred as Suzie, a passenger freshly spurned by
her adulterous lover, in an aeroplane disaster movie, Last Flight to Abuja, which was the highest grossing film at the African box office last year.
Her breakthrough role came in 1995, in the Nollywood classic Mortal Inheritance,
in which she played a sickle-cell patient fighting for her life. Since
then she has established a staggering average of 16 films a year.
I
put it to her that she must be the most prolific actress in the world.
She laughs and shakes her head. “I am sure there are people who have
beaten that record in Nigeria. Trust me.
It is easy to turn
around with straight-to-video movies. It is the fashion to shoot until
you drop, night and day. You have to remember that we are on very low
budgets, so there is no time to wait.”
Nollywood began fewer than 20
years ago on the bustling streets of Lagos. Its pioneers were traders
and bootleggers who started out selling copies of Hollywood films before
graduating into producing their own titles as an inexpensive way to
procure more content for a burgeoning market.
The traders finance
the films (the average budget is £15,000-£30,000), then sell copies in
bulk to local operators, who distribute them in markets, shops and
street-corners for as little as £2 each.
The financial equation is problematic, with endemic piracy, issues over copyright and a lack of legally binding contracts.
Even
so, what started as a ramshackle business is today worth an estimated
£320 million a year, and rising. All this in a country that still lacks a
reliable electricity supply.
What is the secret of Omotola’s appeal?
“I don’t know,” she says, shrugging. “I wish someone would tell me!
People can relate to me, I suppose. They feel as if they know me. A lot
of my audience has grown up with me.”
At the same time, in a country
that is heavily defined by religion and tradition, it helps that she is
seen as a stable role model – a God-fearing woman who has been married
to the same man for 17 years, and balances her work-life with bringing
up four children.
Omotola Jalade Ekeinde was born into a middle-class
family of strict Methodists in Lagos. Her father was the manager of the
Lagos Country Club, while her mother worked for a local supermarket
chain.
She has two younger brothers and was a tomboy, fiercely
independent. “I used to scare boys from a very young age. They found me
too much, because I knew what I wanted and I’d boss them around. In
those days my mother would joke that I would never find a husband.”
As a child she was closest to her father. “He was a different kind of African man,” she recalls.
“He
was very enlightened. He always asked me what I wanted, and encouraged
me to speak up. He treated me like a boy.” He died in a car accident
when Omotola was 12, while she was away at boarding-school.
“I didn’t
grieve,” she says. “When I got home people were telling me that my
mother had been crying for days, and that, as the eldest, I had to be
strong for her and my brothers. I didn’t know what to do, so I just
bottled everything up.
It affected me for many years afterwards. I was always very angry.”
Omotola
would later play out her repressed grief on camera, using it as an
emotional trigger to make herself cry whenever scripts called for it.
But this soon created other problems.
Omotola and family
“The
director would shout, 'Cut!’ and I’d still be crying,” she recalls. “I
could bring the tears, but I could not control them. In the end I had to
stop using that technique.”
At the age of 16 Omotola met her future
husband, Matthew Ekeinde, then 26, in church. He was so keen on her that
the day after their first meeting he showed up at her house
unannounced.
“He soon became a friend of the family. He was almost
like a father figure,” she says. “He’d drop my brothers at school and
stuff.”
Ekeinde proposed when Omotola was 18. Initially, Omotola’s
mother thought her daughter too young to marry, and asked Matthew to
wait, but he refused. “She was really shocked,” says Omotola.
“She
said, 'If you want something badly enough you wait for it,’ but he said,
'If I want something I take it.’ He was very, very bold. It was one of
the things I found fascinating about him.”
They had two wedding
ceremonies, the second of which took place on a flight from Lagos to
Benin. “He’s amazing. If I weren't married to him I couldn’t see myself
with anybody else. I’m a handful.”
Ekeinde has become a reluctant poster boy for a new kind of African man.
“A
lot of men come up to him and say, 'You’re a real man – I can’t believe
how you deal with it all.’ He also gets a lot of invitations from
various bodies to speak about how he copes as a modern Nigerian man in a
relationship with a powerful working woman.”
Omotola’s ascent to the
Nollywood elite began the same year she met Ekeinde. She was modelling
at the time. One afternoon she tagged along with a model friend who was
attending a film audition.
“She didn’t get the part, and she came out and was very sad,” says Omotola. “Then she said, 'Why don’t you go in and have a go?’
I said 'OK,’ and went in and got the part. My friend wasn’t happy. That was the end of our friendship.”
Omotola
has somehow also found the time to release three albums. And then there
is her charitable work. “First and foremost I actually consider myself a
humanitarian,” she says proudly.
At the Time 100 Gala with Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis
She started in 2005, working with the United Nations as a World Food Programme ambassador. She now has her own foundation, the Omotola Youth Empowerment Programme.
“I
have a lot of young people writing to me, feeling disillusioned.
There’s so much injustice in Africa, and people’s lives being trampled
on. The foundation was designed to give voice to these people.”
Her
own voice has been greatly enhanced by the success of her
reality-television show. It is the first show of its kind in Africa,
watched by 150 million people across the continent. “
A lot of women
say to me that I am their role model and example. They say, 'If Omotola
can do it, I can do it.’ I also get a lot of fan letters from men that
say, 'You are the reason I allow my wife to work, or pursue a career,’
because they see that I am married and that I am doing both.”
Omotola
is now one of the most powerful people in what’s being called the “new
Nollywood”, a fresh chapter for the industry, characterised by better
scripts, improved production values and cinema rather than DVD-only
releases.
But there are obstacles for the new Nollywood, not
least the fact that Nigeria only has seven major cinemas, and that
ticket prices are way beyond the reach of most citizens.
Nollywood’s
biggest problem by far, however, is that its films – including Omotola’s
– are still not very good. Theirs is a fuzzy, low-budget aesthetic in
which histrionic acting combines with often ludicrous plot lines.
The
films drown in melodrama, and many scenes are unintentionally comic.
Production values and the rigours of plot and character development are
dispensed with in the mad rush to complete and distribute.
It’s akin
to half-cooking food to feed impatient mouths, and the results feel like
first drafts. Nevertheless, African audiences don’t seem to care, as
long as the films are cheap enough for a downtrodden public desperate
for escapism, and they feature their own home-grown stars on screen.
So, what does the future hold for Omotola?
She recently made her American debut, in a television drama, Hit the Floor, opposite the R&B star Akon. Does she see her future as Nollywood or Hollywood?
“I’ll
just go with the flow. We [in Nollywood] want to collaborate, we don’t
want to leave. We are hoping to be the first film industry that will
pull Hollywood in, instead of them pulling us out.”
This may not be
such a crazy idea, as Hollywood sees the amounts invested in Nollywood,
plus a potential audience of over one billion Africans (155 million in
Nigeria alone).
Would she like to work with Spielberg? “Oh, please, let it be!” she says, clasping her hands together hopefully.
“Please!
Everything happens for a reason.” I ask her if she took Spielberg’s
number at that Time dinner. “Hello? I wouldn’t be African if I didn’t,
now would I?”
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