In a recent interview, Doctor Strange star Chiwetel Ejiofor talked about what got him interested in the Marvel cinematic universe, as well as equal representation in cinema – via Financial Times.
Ejiofor on his interest in the MCU:
“Marvel has managed to make popular films really accessible and really good. I was very interested in what Joss Whedon did with The Avengers. He’s so skilled as a writer, and he started to really split those narratives and create characters that can intersect and then splinter off into all these individual stories. I think there’s an energy there because they want to make good movies that a lot of people will like, and they feel much more open to ideas.”
He then discussed the visuals of Doctor Strange:
“The first conversations that we had were about the visuals. They’d already created the visual language early on and I certainly hadn’t seen anything like it.”
And finally, Ejiofor discussed the controversy regarding Tilda Swinton playing the Ancient One, as well as equal representation in general:
“I think representation in cinema is a really important issue. There are a lot of films that don’t have any representation at all, are very monocultural, and have mono ideas on what race and gender mean, and who should be stars, and who shouldn’t. Doctor Strange is just not an example of that. It’s something we seem to like to do, turning perfect into the enemy of good. We let other things slide, the 85 percent of the films out there that don’t really attempt to address these issues at all. But because they have entirely white, male casts, we don’t bother to talk about them.”
