David and Jessica Oyelowo use many hats (spouses, parents, actors, producers, directors, writers, and most of the time, these tandem roles are filling. But above all, the oyelowos are narrators of narrators. And through their production company, Yoruba Saxon, they hope The epicenter of the universes they create.
“David coined this phrase, 'normalizing the marginalized',” Jessica explains when we talked in a video call in April, sitting next to David in his house in southern California. “Make people the protagonist of their own stories where they are completely human, fully made, beautiful, complicated and difficult, because those were not the types of roles available to us.”
To the couple, who met as teenagers while acting in the youth theater in England and married at age 20, it was difficult for him to enter the television industry there.
“I will be careful with what I say, but it was really difficult for us, particularly for David, to get the things we wanted to do,” says Jessica.
David intervenes with a more forceful evaluation: “I will have less careful than Jesus and I will say that we like our racism and my misogyny cold and in our face. That is one of the beauties of living in the United States. It is very obvious. The United Kingdom is world -class to express those elements in the beautiful, the class system …” “
“Colonization. 'Let's help you',” Jess adds.
David Oyelowo in “Cheese Government”, a surreal family comedy set in the San Fernando Valley in the 1960s.
(Apple TV+)
When moving to the United States in 2007, they discovered that roles for black men in cinema and television were often limited to drug traffickers and criminals, slaves and servants. As for women, Jessica recalls a description of the character that asks a woman with “t cheerful and a flat stomach.”
“In fact, I took that hearing just to 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 am much more than a something intelligent and sexy and he is much more than the stereotyped roles that were offered to black men at that time.”
As the couple continued raising their four children and focusing on their careers, they decided to create the roles they were looking for. In 2014, they founded their production company. “We did not set out to be producers,” says David. “The need was definitely the mother of the invention. I cannot wait for someone else to do things, how we want to be and see in the world. We have to use any platform, notoriety, talent and connections that we have to do it ourselves.”
Jessica and David Oyelowo. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The company's name combines its two cultures: David is ancestry of Yoruba and Igbo, and Jessica is Anglo -Saxon. Currently, the company has a team of seven people, including the Oyelowos, and the couple accredits that team for their successes. Together they have developed projects such as Paramount+ Series “Lawmen: Bass Reeves”; Debut as director of David, “The Water Man”; and Jessica's documentary “become king.” On April 16, Apple TV+ premiered the 10 episodes “Cheese Government Cheese” episodes, in which David Stars, part of Yoruba Saxon's first view agreement with the platform.
Set in the San Fernando Valley at the end of the 1960s, the series, created by Paul Hunter and Aeysha Carr, presents David as the Zany, with the Faith Hampton Chambers, recently released from prison and determined to sell his self-ruling drill to an aerospace company, while he also tries to recover the respect of his wife and two children.
“It is a parabolic, absurd and strange family comedy, and you can see a world in which a network or study can think:” Let's make it based. “But that is not what we set out 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 love to see those things. We never get to those things. We are never represented in those things. Why can't we be expansive in our narration?”
“We did not set out to be producers,” says David Oyelowo, but “I can't wait for someone else to do things, how we want to be and see in the world.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“The 'government cheese' is one of the most incredible examples of joy to normalize the marginalized,” says Jessica. “When you have a black family in Los Angeles in the 1960s and has nothing to do with civil rights, it has nothing to do with oppression.”
“They are political acts,” adds David. “When much of what you see during the 60s when it comes to blackness is the fight, it is radical to see joy and be able to laugh and be surreal.”
I mention the novel “Onyaka and The Academy of the Sun”, by the British Nigerian author Tọlá Okogwu. It is a medium -degree science fiction book about a girl with psychochinetic powers that has become a series of four books. Westbrook Studios by Yoruba Saxon and Will Smith associated with Netflix to adapt the book to a movie.
“'Onyaka' is an absolute bull eye for what we are looking for, but it is also symptomatic of the challenge we have,” says David. “We won traction with that 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 evident that much of that was performative and not of depth of bones. Projects like that suddenly become challenged.”
And although the current political climate can put some of their stories at risk, it does not change the way they will tell those stories. In fact, it energizes them even more.
As David says, “Attack against Dei or not, we have been doing it before there was all this energy around him and we will do it later.”
