‘The Struggle is Surreal’ (April 2025)

David Oyelowo has a new friend. On a March afternoon drained of all its sun, a studio in Glendale has been transformed into a cozy Wes Anderson-esque wonderland. Folding chairs are suspended in the air over here; a human web has been woven from black yarn there. And, of course, a rustic backdrop featuring melting clocks, a lot like Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, bridges the familiar with the fantastical. The sounds of his fellow Nigerians Davido, Fela Kuti, and even his son, Asher Yelo, elevate the good vibrations.

As Oyelowo, 49, serves fierce face and moisturized melanin to the camera, a caramel-colored French bulldog named Miles (the stylist’s plus-one) enters the frame to hit his mark alongside Number One on the call sheet. The British multi-hyphenate, also a dog lover, is perfectly fine with sharing the lens and rewards the modeling pooch with proper scritches. “You’re a good boy,” he tells Miles.

Sixteen (literal) miles away from this installation is the one known as the San Fernando Valley, aka The Valley, the region that inspired Apple TV+’s charmingly surrealist new comedy series, Government Cheese. The 10-episode romp, debuting on the streamer on April 16, stars and is produced by Oyelowo. He plays Hampton Chambers, a man newly released from prison, driven by faith and family to pitch and sell his self-sharpening drill to an aerospace company in 1960s Chatsworth, California. Over the course of the series, Chamber’s bold ambitions and shady past collide in hilarious and tragic ways as he stumbles on his path to righteousness.

Oyelowo has built his acting career on never being the same character twice and being the change he wants to see. As the nation and Hollywood roll back DEI efforts put in place after the murder of George Floyd, his fight to globalize more diverse Black storytelling transcends representation — it’s about reclamation and reinvention.

Oyelowo, pronounced oh-yeh-loh-woh, knows a thing or three about hard work. He has collaborated with industry greats like Ava DuVernay, Christopher Nolan, and Steven Spielberg. He has played Black heroes who don’t wear capes, from a Tuskegee Airman (Red Tails) to a dogged detective (Don’t Let Go). 

With a surname that means “a king deserves respect,” he has, also, fittingly, a thing for kings. He’s portrayed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 2015’s Selma as well as King Seretse Khama, Botswana’s first president, in 2016’s A United Kingdom. He was also the first Black actor to be cast as an English king in a major Shakespeare production when he played King Henry VI during his time at the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company in London in 2001. He notes, almost as an aside, that playing or being the first Black anything does not come easy: “Groundbreaking is exhausting because it tends to be hard ground.”

Government Cheese is a slight detour from Oyelowo’s usual brand of slow-burn dramas. See: Selma, The Help, and The Butler. Those films share the same timeline as the series, but to produce a different effect. “To watch a show [like Government Cheese] with a group of characters in that decade tied to aspiration, joy, family, frivolity, and inventiveness is a bullseye when it comes to my desire to normalize and contextualize marginalized Black life,” he says after the photoshoot.

Created by renowned ad and music video director Paul Hunter (he’s helmed campaigns for global giants like Nike and Apple as well as visuals for artists like Michael Jackson, Pharrell, and Mariah Carey, to name a few) and veteran writer-producer Aeysha Carr (The Carmichael Show, Woke), the series borrows its name from the gooey government handout distributed in 2-lb blocks to American families on welfare from the ‘70s to the early ‘80s. Decades later, Hunter reimagined his formative years in the Valley and gave the term new meaning.

“When I was writing the story, I used government cheese as the inspiration because my dad was like, ‘When your back is up against the wall, [that’s] probably [when] you’re most creative,’” says Hunter, who based Oyelowo’s character on his father.

Like Chambers, Oyelowo is also entrepreneurial with his work. Alongside his wife, Jessica, he runs Yoruba Saxon Productions, which produced his directorial debut, The Water Man, and the psychological drama Nightingale. (The company recently secured a first-look deal to produce features and series with the home of Government Cheese, Apple TV+.) He’s also a co-founder of Mansa, a streaming platform for “global Black culture,” alongside actors Nate Parker, Chiké Okonkwo, and entrepreneur Zak Tanjeloff.  

To watch a show [like ‘Government Cheese’] with a group of characters in that decade tied to aspiration, joy, family, frivolity, and inventiveness is a bullseye when it comes to my desire to normalize and contextualize marginalized Black life.

To be clear, gratitude comes with the ability to champion Black stories, get them funded and made. Since 2007, he’s called Los Angeles home, residing with Jessica, their four kids — sons Asher, 23, Caleb, 20, and Penuel, 17, and daughter Zoe, 13—  and their three dogs, Maui, Marmite, and Levi. If he’s not in Zoom meetings, on a set, or poring over scripts, he’s honoring family commitments. “I don’t think there’s anything I’m hiding,” he offers with a laugh. He also wears a black pendant in the shape of Africa on a silver chain around his neck during the photo shoot. “I try to be an open book.”

In revisiting the chapters from his childhood, Oyelowo can’t recall a single image of a young Black character in anything he saw as a kid. His earliest movie memory was at five years old watching Christopher Reeve in Superman. He cites beloved ‘80s classics that fueled his obsession with storytelling like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Goonies, and Stephen King’s coming-of-age drama Stand By Me. Looking back, he knew something was off. “I could relate to the [protagonists] as kids, but they didn’t look like me,” he says of the limited catalog of Black characters on screen at the time. “You eat what you’re given.”

His humble upbringing left little space for dreams of groundbreaking fame. Born in the U.K., Oyelowo remembers his parents, Stephen and Victoria, speaking of their family’s royal lineage, a flex that had no material benefits. “There was no evidence of that around us,” he says. His family, which included his two younger brothers, Sam and Emmanuel, lived in a one-bedroom compound with communal bathrooms in Lagos from ages 6 to 13. “I think [my parents] felt the need to move back to Nigeria because things were just so challenging from a racial perspective,” he says. “But then in Nigeria, there was a military regime that was incredibly corrupt.” Political upheaval forced them to return to England and settle into a “tiny” council estate in North London.

He applauds his “incredibly loving” parents, both of whom have since passed away, for doing the most. His father was a management training manager at the now-defunct Nigeria Airways, and his mother was his uncle’s secretary. They worked menial jobs but eventually became entrepreneurs, running a taxi dispatch service together. Like many immigrant parents, they worked overtime to provide the best education for their sons and encourage them to become lawyers, doctors, and engineers. 

Oyelowo chose a different route. He pursued acting from his teen years, joining the National Youth Music Theatre (where he met his wife) and then on to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. On a spiritual level, he was getting his faith together and became a 16-year-old born-again Christian living in a Baptist household. “All I interpret that as, is you have your natural birth and then you’re [born] into this realization that there’s more to this life,” he says.

Early in his career, he encountered a crisis of faith that could have altered his trajectory forever. After his wife endured several miscarriages following the birth of their first child, he had his Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane moment. “I remember wailing at God like, ‘Where are you in the midst of this?’” he recalls. “It was a moment in my marriage where it could have taken a turn,” My wife and I [could have] retreated into different corners … But the gift that came out of it was us becoming even more of a unit, falling deeper in love, and being stronger going forward.”

Another life-changing revelation came in 2007 when Oyelowo and his young family moved to L.A. to launch his Hollywood career. He’d auditioned for the role of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma but hadn’t gotten the part. Several delays and directors later, Oyelowo journaled about a vivid sign he received from God calling him to play Dr. King. The film was working its way through Hollywood and wouldn’t see the screen until 2015. In that time, Oyelowo picked up roles in other movies that spanned the civil rights era in America—an unintentional preparation for the minister. Lee Daniels brought Oyelowo back as King; Ava DuVernay signed on to direct Selma. And the rest is Black history.

Nearly six decades since Dr. King’s dream, Black leading men are claiming more and more space in Hollywood. With props to pioneers Sidney, Samuel, Denzel, Morgan, and Harry, who paved the way, this next generation of actors is expanding worldviews as MCU mainstays — the late Chadwick Boseman, Anthony Mackie, and Michael B. Jordan — action icons like Will Smith and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and the stars of genre films that skip the tropes à la Jordan Peele. The talent pool from across the pond is also deep. The boom in Black British actors coming to America for opportunities includes Idris Elba, Daniel Kaluuya, John Boyega, and Oyelowo. But with limited roles available and opportunities shrinking in Hollywood, are there enough projects for this talent?

Especially when you take development limbo into account. Government Cheese couldn’t get past Hollywood gatekeepers for years. In 2005, Hunter began writing what was originally a short film based on his family in the Valley. (“I didn’t know there was a prevalence of Black people in the Valley back in the day,” says Oyelowo.) In 2019, Hunter approached Oyelowo through a mutual industry connection with a “really weird and funny” script, where he would play a version of Hunter’s father, a man who had been incarcerated with the will to strive higher than his circumstances. Oyelowo was in.

When you have an industry that’s telling you that Black [content] doesn’t travel or there isn’t an audience, or they’re telling you that it’s too expensive relative to how much remuneration will come in relation to the ROI, it’s fundamentally a lie.

The script was shopped to producers who didn’t understand its quirky tone. Hunter and Oyelowo then shot the short in five days and went back to pitching it to streamers and film festivals via Zoom meetings during the pandemic, but still — no dice. Leveraging his ad business expertise, Hunter, who has helmed brand campaigns for McDonald’s and T-Mobile and iconic music videos for nearly every artist you can think of, packaged his pitch as a commercial. Oyelowo helped get the message out. Eventually, six years later, Apple TV+ gave it the green light.

“I wish that wasn’t the circumstance,” Oyelowo says of the years-long struggle that often comes with getting his projects off the ground. “I wish the things that I value didn’t take as long as they do because there’s a lot of pain on the way to it. But there’s also a lot of reward when they come to fruition.”

He doesn’t shy away from saying the quiet parts about the industry out loud, either. “Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, and the Coen brothers can do surrealist, absurdist, outlandish storytelling all day long because they have 120 years of cinema that has contextualized their experience to the degree where [they] can continue to color outside of the lines,” says Oyelowo, name-checking — respectfully — the filmmakers who inspired Government Cheese. “If we [as Black people] have a show set in the ’60s, people’s minds instantaneously go to civil rights and racial struggle.” (In the decades to follow, Black family sitcoms like Everybody Hates Chris (the series based on Chris Rock’s years as a teen set in 1980s Brooklyn) and Family Matters (a ’90s classic) launched the careers of stars Tyler James Williams and Jaleel White, respectively, while blending the funny with heartfelt life lessons.)

Blame box-office politics. Black content has long been pigeonholed into specific genres and narratives perpetuated by strict stereotyping and dictated, solely, by the gross earnings of what came before. In 2012, Quentin Tarantino made Django Unchained, a revenge-fantasy Western about slavery that raked in $426 million and became his highest-grossing film. (Spike Lee famously told this publication Django was “disrespectful to my ancestors.”) The following year, Steve McQueen released the Oscar-winning true-to-the-buttons period piece 12 Years a Slave, which made $187 million. Spot the differences. In 2018, an anomaly cracked open the door in the form of Ryan Coogler’s Marvel masterpiece Black Panther, which brought in a billion dollars globally. Audiences were ready for different Black stories, even if studios weren’t.

“When you have an industry that’s telling you that Black [content] doesn’t travel or there isn’t an audience, or they’re telling you that it’s too expensive relative to how much remuneration will come in relation to the ROI, it’s fundamentally a lie,” Oyelowo says.

Headlines about DEI crackdowns are grim during the current political landscape, too. Hollywood has sadly followed suit. According to a recent UCLA report on diversity in Hollywood, Black, Indigenous, and people of color remained underrepresented in every major employment category last year. Add in the second era of Trump and fallout from the 2023 strikes, this will mean less work and opportunity for minority groups in the future. “A lot of the time, in my industry, they want a version of what they’ve seen before because it’s a very fear-ridden and expensive business,” says Oyelowo. “So, people taking swings on a truly original idea is harder to get on board with.”

Rule-breaking cinema is steadily becoming the new normal. Surreal small-screen smashes like The Eric Andre Show, Atlanta, and the aforementioned Severance have helped usher in an era of television leaning all the way into the weird and wild with Black characters in the mix. (We see you, Milchick.) While experimental, multi-faceted storytelling typically favors a certain, paler group, Government Cheese is the latest TV entree to break from convention and paint Black family life in a refreshingly fun and poignant way.

Carr, who met Hunter and began working on the series in 2020, recalls how the team set out to create a half-hour show “with an open landscape.” That included obscure cold opens and immersive world-building. “We didn’t do an A story and a B story,” she says. “We looked at each episode as its own ecosystem and little movie.” 

Cinephiles may catch references to Anderson’s filmography à la The Royal Tenenbaums and Bottle Rocket. The work of photographers Stefan Shore and William Eggleston also made the show’s vision board. Add the eclectic ‘60s score — Hunter’s parents loved R&B, jazz, and rock — and the familiar faces who pop up throughout the season, and the show appears algorithm-ready. (Even Hunter’s friend and collaborator Pharrell became an instant fan. He created several songs for the show, including its opening theme.)

But there was more work to be done behind the scenes. With his wife’s support, Oyelowo advocated filming in the Valley, specifically Stoney Peak in Chatsworth and Burro Flats in the Chumash territory, locations that were pivotal to his character’s life story. While it would have been more cost-effective to shoot in the originally proposed location of New Mexico, the L.A.-based crew put in 12-hour days close to home and got to sleep in their own beds, thanks to Oyelowo. 

“David has a heart of gold and is also a force of nature,” says Carr. “He will fight to the death, but is always kind, and it comes from a place of him just being a genuine person.” Hunter adds, “He brought everyone in, starting with the crew from the PAs to every department. He fought to have certain locations. He inspired people, and it took a lot of the pressure off of me at times to make the project.” 

Oyelowo still felt the weight as the star and stakeholder. He was involved in developing the scripts, casting, budgeting, and creating an environment that was authentic and supportive. He even took his co-star/show wife, Simone Missick, to ballroom dance classes to establish “comfort, proximity, and history that would translate on-screen. (Spoiler: It worked.)

He compares his double duties to the challenges he faced on the 2023 series Lawmen: Bass Reeves, where he played the titular figure and executive produced the series alongside Taylor Sheridan. “[It was] an incredibly complicated, big show that required me to focus on my role. But we were going into a strike, and we had incredibly inclement weather and a very, very big budget,” he says without offering numbers. Sheridan’s popular and pricey productions, like Yellowstone and its prequels 1883 and 1923, have reportedly cost anywhere between $7-22 million an episode.“I wanted to be mindful of not abusing that privilege, especially [since] I wanted others who look like me to be afforded that opportunity. I didn’t want to give any studio the excuse not to do it again.”

Ditto for Government Cheese and every story he believes in. The industry may continue moving goalposts for Black creatives, but Oyelowo remembers his why: The little boy who first fell in love with acting — and the ones coming behind him. “I don’t take roles that are not in some way a gift to my 12-year-old self,” he says. “That 12-year-old is now my kids and other Black and brown kids walking the planet. They are very much top of mind anytime I decide to go to work.” When his car arrives, Oyelowo bags up a baguette and salad platter (he skips the sweets in front of his fitness trainer, Daryl) from the leftover spread, intent on bringing it home for dinner. Even with a loaded schedule, he still keeps feeding his family — and fellow creatives — a priority. “If you don’t keep those plates spinning, you never know when that project will meet its moment or momentum,” he says. “The only thing you can control is the hard work.”

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Photographer: Sage East

Photo Assistant: Ronnie Peoples

Lighting Director: Byron Knickleberry

Art Direction/Set Designer: Jack Taylor

Set Designer Assistant: Jamier Burden

Wardrobe Stylist: Mark Holmes

Wardrobe Assistant: Grant Grosch

Makeup Artist: Vonda K. Morris

Art Designer: R. Scott Wells

Videographer: Jason Chandler

Video Assistants: Laetitia Mumford

Studio: Verge Studios