Lupita Nyong'o, who plays Patsey, is a slave with whom Fassbender's character is obsessed. Photo / AP
Actors in Steve McQueen's Oscar-nominated drama were immersed in the world of 19th-century slavery.
Actors wait a lifetime for a role as rich as that of Solomon Northup, a 19th-century free black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery and later wrote a memoir about the experience.
Yet British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor did not jump at the chance to play Northup in director Steve McQueen's film adaptation of 12 Years A Slave.
"I had to pause before accepting the part," says Ejiofor. The script included physically and emotionally gruelling scenes which Ejiofor was not sure he could connect to.
"I was consumed by the complications of telling this story and whether those places could be reached by me," he said.
Such concerns evaporated after Ejiofor took the role and became part of McQueen's (Hunger, Shame) immersive approach.
A scene that required Ejiofor to stand on tiptoes, a noose around his neck, for a prolonged period was shot on a Louisiana plantation much like the plantations on which Northup toiled. The setting, and the physical challenges of the scene, took him further into character, Ejiofor said.
"In a way, you are looking to legitimise your ability to tell someone's story," Ejiofor said. "I felt by getting as close to how [Northup] would have felt physically, it sort of helped me do that."
Ejiofor's latest project is Z for Zachariah, a post-apocalyptic story being filmed on Banks Peninsula in Canterbury. He'll reportedly be taking a break from the New Zealand shoot to attend the Oscars next month.
Following its Golden Globe win for best drama, 12 Years is up for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (for Ejiofor) and Supporting nods for Michael Fassbender, who plays a hate-filled plantation owner, and Lupita Nyong'o, who plays Patsey, a slave with whom Fassbender's character is obsessed.
Nyong'o said McQueen cultivated an adventurous yet safe atmosphere on set, allowing his cast to reach difficult emotional and physical states.
"I watched Hunger and Shame, and I knew that Steve was an artist whose vision, whose voice, whose aesthetic I could trust," Nyong'o said of McQueen's 2008 film about Irish hunger strikers and 2011 movie about a New York City sex addict, both of which starred Fassbender.
On set in Louisiana, McQueen would "encourage us to fail and then feel better and to really risk-take because that's when you find interesting, magical, miraculous things", Nyong'o said.
Kenyan actress Nyong'o makes her big-screen debut in 12 Years. She said more seasoned actors Ejiofor, Fassbender and Sarah Paulson (who plays Fassbender's duplicitous wife) created "a high level of respect, and a real circle of trust" on set.
"We needed each other to go to these really difficult places."
Her performance was guided partly by Northup's description in his book of Patsey "having an air of loftiness that neither labour nor lash could rid her of".
Northup's book, published in 1853 after he regained his freedom and returned home to New York state, provided a template for a production striving for realism, Ejiofor said.
"The clues were all within the very detailed historical narrative that Solomon had written."
For authenticity, costume supervisor Patricia Norris applied Louisiana soil to Solomon's work clothes to show wear and tear and dried the clothes in the sun.
"It was something like 108F [42C] on the first day of shooting, with very high humidity, and we were all outside picking cotton," Ejiofor said. "It put you totally in the world of what was happening [in Northup's book]."
Ejiofor said his formal education in England mostly skipped lessons about slavery.
But he educated himself about the international slave trade, he said, partly because of his family's roots in Nigeria, a longtime slave-trade hub.
Interested in learning more about American slavery, Ejiofor travelled to Louisiana weeks before the 12 Years shoot to get a feel for the area. The candour with which the Southerners he met discussed the slavery era was unexpected, he said.
Descendants of plantation owners were "so open and wanting to reflect and engage with this period of history", Ejiofor said.
"[They] would take us all around their plantations and tell us all the stories, which would include the revolts where some of their forebears were killed ... [They] really wanted to get these stories out.
"It was an extraordinary realisation that there are so many people who felt there has been a slight gap in the knowledge and the expression of this time and era."
One assumes that 12 Years can be so unflinching about slavery because its director is British and therefore detached from Americans' whirling emotions. Ejiofor said that is not the case.
"Steve's own background is from the West Indies, where there was kind of a ferocious slave trade over sugar," Ejiofor said. "I feel like he has a strong connection to slavery."
Most overarching, though, is McQueen's desire to "look at certain areas that people for whatever reason have shied away from", Ejiofor said.
In 12 Years, it is the cruel truths of slavery; in Hunger, the abject conditions in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison; in Shame, a sex addict's joyless physical connections.
"He's interested in these areas that people want to push aside but are very important to look at," Ejiofor said of McQueen.