David and Jessica Oyelowo wear many hats – spouses, parents, actors, producers, directors, writers – and most often, they fill these roles in tandem. But above all, the Oyelowos are storytellers. And thanks to their production company, Yoruba Saxon, they hope to use the stories they tell to generate empathy in the world, placing marginalized people at the epicenter of the universes they create.
“David invented this sentence,” normalizing the marginalized “”, explains Jessica when we discuss a video call in April, seated next to David in their southern California house. “Make people the protagonist of their own stories where they are fully human, fully made and beautiful and complicated and difficult and wonderful, because it is not the types of roles that were at our disposal.”
The couple, who met with their teenagers while they were performing in the Théâtre des Jeunes in England and married at the beginning of the twenties, had trouble entering the television industry there.
“I'm going to be careful what I say, but it was really difficult for us, especially for David, to be able to get the things we wanted to do,” explains Jessica.
David intervenes with a more blunt evaluation: “I will be less careful than Jess and say that we love our racism and our cold and opposite misogyny. It is certainly one of the beauties of life in America. It is very obvious. The United Kingdom is world class to sleep these elements in Nicety, the class system… ”
“Colonization”. We come to help you, ”adds Jess.
David Oyelowo in “Government Cheese”, a surreal family comedy taking place in the San Fernando valley in the 1960s.
(Apple TV +)
By moving to the United States in 2007, they found that roles for black men in cinema and television were often limited to drug traffickers and criminals, slaves and servants. As for women, Jessica remembers a character description calling for a woman with a “T -stomach”.
“I actually took this audition just so that I can tell the director how disgusting it was,” explains Jessica. “So he wanted to give me the work!” I said to myself, “No, are you crazy? »»
She continues: “I am much more than something smart and sexy and it is much more than the stereotypical roles that were offered to black men at the time.”
While the couple continued to raise their four children and focus on their careers, they decided to create the roles they were looking for themselves. In 2014, they founded their production company. “We haven't taken producers,” said David. “The necessity was definitely the mother of the invention. I cannot wait for someone else to do things, as we want to be in the world. We must use any platform, notoriety, talent and connections that we must do it ourselves.”
Jessica and David Oyelowo. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The name of the company merges their two cultures – David is from the Yoruba and Igbo descent, and Jessica is Anglo -Saxon. The company currently has a team of seven people, including the Oyelowos, and the couple attributes this team for their successes. Together, they developed projects like Paramount + Series “Lawmen: Bass Reeves”; David's beginnings of director, “The Water Man”; And Jessica's documentary “becoming king”. On April 16, Apple TV + created the 10 episodes series “Government cheese” in which David features – part of the Yoruba Saxon agreement with the platform.
Located in the San Fernando valley in the late 1960s, the series, Created by Paul Hunter and Aeysha CarrPresents David as the wacky Hampton Chambers, motivated by faith, newly released from prison and determined to sell his self-sharping exercise to an aerospace company while also trying to reconquer respect for his wife and two sons.
“It is a parabolic, absurd and original family comedy, and you might see a world in which a network or a studio can think:” Let us be founded “. But that's not what we decided to do, “says David about the surrealist sensitivity of the series.
“Why can't we do things like Wes Anderson or Spike Jonze or Paul Thomas Anderson?” He continues. “We like to look at this kind of thing. We can never be in this kind of thing. We never see each other in these kinds of things. Why can't we be expansive in our narration? ”
“We didn't start to be producers,” said David Oyelowo, but “I can't wait for someone else to do things, as we want to be in the world.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“”'Government cheese' is one of the most incredible examples of joy to normalize marginalized, “said Jessica.” When you have a black family in Los Angeles in the 1960s and it has nothing to do with civil rights, it has nothing to do with oppression. “”
“These are political acts,” adds David. “When a large part of what you see in the 1960s when it comes to darkness is a struggle, it is radical to see joy and to be able to laugh and so that it is surreal.”
I raise the novel “Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun”, by the British Nigerian author Tọlá Okogwu. It is an intermediate quality science fiction book on a young girl with psychocinetic powers who has become a series of four books. Yoruba Saxon and West Smith's Westbrook Studios have teamed up with Netflix to adapt the book in a film.
“` `Onyaka '' is an absolute bull eye for what we are looking to do, but it is also symptomatic of the challenge we have,” explains David. “We gained ground with this project following the murder of George Floyd and at a time when there was a cultural correction and people seemed to want to do better. But now we are at a time when it is obvious that many of it was performative and not bone projects like this being another.
And although the current political climate can put some of their stories in danger, that does not change the way they will tell these stories. In fact, that more.
As David says: “Attack or not, we did it before there is all this energy around him and we will do it after.”
