Carmen Ejogo

Carmen Ejogo (2019)

Carmen Elizabeth Ejogo (22 October 1973) is a British actress and singer. She is best known for her roles in such films as Metro (1997), Love's Labour's Lost (2000), What's the Worst That Could Happen? (2001), Boycott (2001), Away We Go (2009), Sparkle (2012), Alex Cross (2012), The Purge: Anarchy (2014), Selma (2014), Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), It Comes at Night (2017), Alien: Covenant (2017), and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018).

Quotes

• Success for me will be where the body of work I’ve done afforded me the opportunity to be as good as I can be, and to explore myself and to see what I’m capable of. People like that share a willingness to be scared and to take chances.
  • [1]

• There’s a lot more opportunity to be a person of color, to be a woman, and to be at the center of the storytelling.
  • [2]

• you need to be able to step outside yourself, and you don’t necessarily need to have real-life experiences to draw upon.
  • [3]

• There’s a social attitude toward being fairly accepting of violence, and coupled with the access to guns, in some ways we’re already at a place where in certain communities, gun violence is already rife—and in some ways, because of policy, it’s kind of condoned from the top.
  • [4]
• Any good director, and I've worked with a few that I would call very good, they know how to disarm any anxieties very quickly.[5]
• As an artist, there's so many categories that you're put into, that there are so many things that I'm about that I've never explored as an artist on film. I don't see myself in so many characters in film.[6]
• Coming from the U.K., I can think of so many great songs and musical moments that didn't require a belter of a voice; my favorite singer is Kate Bush and she's not a belter, or PJ Harvey... I'm definitely more of an alternative girl.[7]
• Great artists are the ones who have put their entire selves out there to be adored, humiliated, to be picked at, cherished, all of those things, and haven't shied away from that.[8]
• Growing up in London, with a hippie mom, I don't know that I'm most people's definition of what a black person is. I'm mixed, yes, but in the world I'm defined as black before I'm defined white. I've never been called white.[9]
• I can remember being very keen to go to drama school at the age of eight, and practising ballet in my bedroom to Queen soundtracks.[10]
• One of the reasons I didn't ever pursue a career - in the music world if you're black or mixed, you need to be able to belt a song or else you're not a singer, you know?[11]