David Oyelowo 'had to leave Britain' for career

David Oyelowo, who plays Martin Luther King in the Oscar-nominated Hollywood film "Selma", says he had to leave Britain because of a lack of opportunities for black actors.
"We make period dramas (in Britain), but there are almost never black people in them, even though we've been on these shores for hundreds of years," Oyelowo said in an interview with the Radio Times.
"I remember taking a historical drama with a black figure at its centre to a British executive with greenlight power, and what they said was that if it's not Jane Austen or Dickens, the audience don't understand," he told the television listings magazine.
"And I thought 'OK -- you are stopping people having a context for the country they live in and you are marginalising me. I can't live with that. So I've got to get out'," the actor said.
Oyelowo, who returned to London at 13 after spending some of his childhood in Nigeria, first came to prominence with a series of performances for the Royal Shakespeare Company in his early 20s.
Martin Luther King is the latest in a string of big-screen roles the 38-year-old actor has won since leaving Britain in 2007 for the United States.
His comments come after The Imitation Game star Benedict Cumberbatch highlighted the lack of diversity on British screens.
Last year actors including Idris Elba, the star of "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom" and comedian Lenny Henry expressed their dismay at the small numbers of people from ethnic minority backgrounds working in the television industry.
Oyelowo told the Radio Times: "There's a string of black British actors passing through where I live now in LA. We don't have 'Downton Abbey', or 'Call the Midwife', or 'Peaky Blinders', or the 50th iteration of 'Pride and Prejudice'.
"We're not in those. And it’s frustrating because it doesn't have to be that way. I shouldn't have to feel like I have to move to America to have a notable career," he said.
"Selma" has been nominated for just two Oscars, despite receiving rave critical reviews and being a hit with audiences in the US.
Oyelowo shrugged off the lack of nominations, saying: "We made a film that is not your typical biopic, that doesn't feel like, 'Oh, here come the strings'. We made the movie we wanted to see, not what we thought the Academy would like."