David and Jessica Oyelowo put on many hats — spouses, mother and father, actors, producers, administrators, writers — and most of the time, they’re filling these roles in tandem. However above all, the Oyelowos are storytellers. And thru their manufacturing firm, Yoruba Saxon, they hope to make use of the tales they inform to generate empathy on the planet, inserting marginalized folks on the epicenter of the universes they create.
“David coined this phrase, ‘normalizing the marginalized,’” Jessica explains once we chat on a video name in April, sitting subsequent to David of their Southern California house. “Making people the protagonist of their own stories where they’re fully human, fully realized and beautiful and complicated and difficult and wonderful, because those were not the kinds of roles that were available to us.”
The couple, who met as youngsters whereas performing in youth theater in England and obtained married of their early 20s, discovered it arduous to interrupt into the TV business there.
“I’m going to be careful with what I say, but it was really hard for us, particularly for David, to be able to get the things we wanted made,” says Jessica.
David interjects with a extra blunt evaluation: “I’ll be less careful than Jess and say that we like our racism and misogyny cold and in our face. That is certainly one of the beauties of living in America. It’s very obvious. The U.K. is world-class at couching those elements in nicety, the class system …”
“Colonization. ‘We’re coming to help you,’” provides Jess.
David Oyelowo in “Government Cheese,” a surrealist household comedy set within the San Fernando Valley within the Sixties.
(Apple TV+)
Upon shifting to the U.S. in 2007, they discovered that roles for Black males in movie and TV usually had been restricted to drug sellers and criminals, slaves and servants. As for ladies, Jessica remembers a personality description calling for a lady with “perky t— and a flat stomach.”
“I actually took that audition just so I could tell the director how disgusting it was,” says Jessica. “Then he wanted to give me the job! I was like, ‘No, are you crazy?’”
She continues, “I’m so much more than a smart, sexy something and he’s so much more than the stereotypical roles that were being offered to Black men at the time.”
Because the couple continued elevating their 4 kids and specializing in their careers, they determined to create the roles they had been on the lookout for themselves. In 2014, they based their manufacturing firm. “We didn’t set out to be producers,” David says. “Necessity was definitely the mother of invention. I can’t wait around for someone else to make the things, the likes of which we want to be in and see in the world. We have to use whatever platform, notoriety, talent and connections we have to do it ourselves.”
Jessica and David Oyelowo. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)
The corporate’s identify melds their two cultures — David is of Yoruba and Igbo descent, and Jessica is Anglo-Saxon. The corporate at the moment has a crew of seven folks, together with the Oyelowos, and the pair credit that crew for his or her successes. Collectively they’ve developed tasks like Paramount+ collection “Lawmen: Bass Reeves”; David’s directorial debut, “The Water Man”; and Jessica’s documentary “Becoming King.” On April 16, Apple TV+ premiered the 10-episode collection “Government Cheese,” through which David stars — a part of Yoruba Saxon’s first-look take care of the platform.
Set within the San Fernando Valley within the late Sixties, the collection, created by Paul Hunter and Aeysha Carr, options David because the zany, faith-driven Hampton Chambers, newly launched from jail and decided to promote his self-sharpening drill to an aerospace firm whereas additionally attempting to win again the respect of his spouse and two sons.
“It’s parabolic, absurdist, quirky family comedy, and you could see a world in which a network or studio may think, ‘Let’s make it grounded.’ But that’s not what we set out to do,” David says of the collection’ surreal sensibility.
“Why can’t we do stuff the likes of Wes Anderson or Spike Jonze or Paul Thomas Anderson?” he continues. “We love watching that stuff. We never get to be in that stuff. We never see ourselves represented in that stuff. Why can’t we be expansive in our storytelling?”
“We didn’t set out to be producers,” David Oyelowo says, however “I can’t wait around for someone else to make the things, the likes of which we want to be in and see in the world.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)
“‘Government Cheese’ is one of the most incredible examples of joy in normalizing the marginalized,” says Jessica. “When you’ve got 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.”
“They’re political acts,” provides David. “When so much of what you see over the ’60s when it comes to Blackness is struggle, it’s radical to see joy and to be able to laugh and for it to be surreal.”
I carry up the novel “Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun,” by British Nigerian writer Tọlá Okogwu. It’s a middle-grade science fiction ebook a couple of younger lady with psychokinetic powers that has became a four-book collection. Yoruba Saxon and Will Smith’s Westbrook Studios partnered with Netflix to adapt the ebook into a movie.
“‘Onyeka’ is an absolute bull’s-eye for what we are looking to make, but it is also symptomatic of the challenge we have,” says David. “We gained traction with that project in the wake of the George Floyd murder and in a moment where there was a cultural correction and people seemed to want to do better. But now we’re in a moment where it’s evident that a lot of that was performative and not bone-deep. Projects like that suddenly become challenged. ‘Onyeka’ being one, ‘Return of the Rocketeer’ at Disney being another.”
And whereas the present political local weather could put a few of their tales in danger, it doesn’t change the way in which they’ll inform these tales. In reality, it energizes them additional.
As David says, “Attack on DEI or not, we’ve been doing it before there was all this energy around it and we will be doing it after.”
