Starting with an illustrious stage career in 1999 when he was offered a season with the RSC playing roles in Ben Johnson’s Volpone, David Oyelowo won the Ian Charleson Award for best performance

David Oyelowo broke new ground as the first black actor to play an English king when he was cast as King Henry VI in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2001 productions of Shakespeare’s trilogy of plays about the king in part of its season, This England: The Histories.

It was a major landmark for colour-blind casting. Although this casting choice was initially criticised by some in the media, Oyelowo’s performance was critically acclaimed and he later won the Ian Charleson Award for best performance by an actor under 30 in a classical play in the same year. (However, a few years later, in comparison, Adrian Lester’s, a black Jamaica-born Briton, casting as Henry V  drew little comment.) Oyelowo said of this experience:

“It’s fascinating to work with a company of actors of such different ages, experience and talents. I’m one of a generation brought up on television whose acting is more ‘naturalistic’, whereas with some of the older generation, it’s more heightened. But I think there’s room for both styles.”

Oyelowo is an English actor of Nigerian descent born in April 1, 1976 in Oxford, England. He is married to actress, Jessica Oyelowo, and they have one son.

Oyelowo first went to drama classes since he fancied a girl who was also going. He then studied Theatre Studies for A level and his teacher suggested he should become an actor. After A levels, Oyelowo enrolled for a year in an Art foundation course before being funded through training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) by Nicholas Hytner. Having been offered television work, Oyelowo left LAMDA before completing the course.

He had begun his stage career in 1999 when he was offered a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) playing roles in Volpone, as the title character in Oroonoko (in which he also performed in the BBC radio adaptation) and Antony and Cleopatra (1999) alongside Guy Henry, Frances de la Tour and Alan Bates.

In 2005, he appeared in a production of Prometheus Bound which was revived in New York in 2007. In 2006, he made his directorial debut on a production of The White Devil, produced by his own theatre company in Brighton, The Brighton Dome Youth Theatre, co-run with fellow Brighton-based actors, Priyanga Burford, Israel Aduramo, Penelope Cobbuld and his wife, Jessica.

He also appeared as Adrian Lester’s screen brother in Kenneth Branagh’s film of As You Like It and as Dr. Junju, alongside Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin, in The Last King of Scotland.

Oyelowo is best known for playing agent Danny Hunter in the British TV drama series, Spooks (known in North America as MI-5). He had before that appeared in Tomorrow La Scala (2002), Maisie Raine (1998) and Brothers and Sisters (1998).

Oyelowo was also cast in a film titled Born Equal exploring aspects of poverty, race, inequality, and class in present-day Britain. Written and directed by Dominic Savage, the film was likened to a British version of the Oscar-winning film, Crash. He appeared alongside Nikki Amuka-Bird (a co-star from Shoot the Messenger) as a couple fleeing persecution in Nigeria. The theme of self identity  resonates in the film, Shoot the Messenger, where he played Joe.

During a chat, he relates his personal experience in Britain and his Nigerian background to aspects of his role as Joe in Shoot the Messenger, noting that :

“Definitely, I was sometimes called ‘coconut’ as Joe is, when I was at school. I was at an inner-city black school, not dissimilar to the one featured in the film. I did my work; I tried to be respectful and respectable. That was to do with my upbringing in Nigeria where the culture is very much one of respecting your elders and really valuing education as a gift, especially if your government has decided it’s something you should get for free. So I can really relate to Joe feeling slightly betrayed by his own community, because I sometimes felt that was happening to me when I didn’t conform at school.”

He appeared as Olaudah Equiano in Grace Unshackled – The Olaudah Equiano Story, a radio play adapting Equiano’s autobiography. This was first broadcast on BBC 7 on Easter Sunday, April 8, 2007, with his wife as Mrs. Equiano.

It took a painstaking search by Oscar-nominated director, Lee Daniels, to finally find his Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) in actor David Oyelowo in his civil rights film, Selma. King was one of the key characters waiting to be cast in a story that revolves around the historic marches led by MLK in 1965 in Selma, AL.

His other TV appearances include:

- The Passion (2008), as Joseph of Arimathea

- Five Days, 2007

- A Raisin in the Sun, 2007.

- a cameo in the 2005 Christmas special of As Time Goes By.