'District 9’s' Sharlto Copley Wins the Hollywood Lottery
Source: AOL
Posted: 08/13/09 1:35PM
Filed Under: Film
By SORAYA ROBERTS
What’s more likely, that a giant spaceship will come to rest over Johannesburg or that an unknown South African will make it onto Hollywood’s A-list? Call me cynical, but I go for the former, though it’s the latter that has recently come to pass. Sharlto Copley, the star of Peter Jackson’s new sci-fi tour de force, District 9 (directed by Neill Blomkamp) has hit the big time.
A former no-name producer/director/actor, Copley is already signing autographs at Comic-Con and gracing the cover of Entertainment Weekly. “How weird is that?” he says on the phone to AOL. "I haven’t quite adjusted to it. Someone just asked me to sign their copy of the magazine and I was like, 'You’ve got to be joking!'"
District 9 revolves around an eponymous slum that houses prawn-like aliens who decades ago became shipwrecked over the South African city of Johannesburg. The novelty has worn off and the town’s human residents wouldn’t mind having their land back. Their prayers are answered by Wikus Van De Merwe (Copley), a suit who works for the MNU, a private company that deals with human-alien relations. Wikus spearheads a program to relocate the aliens to a refugee (see: concentration) camp. Unfortunately, the move does not go as smoothly as the good-natured bureaucrat would have hoped.
The film is based on Neill Blomkamp’s short film Alive in Joburg (2005), but Copley’s role did not appear in the original. The actor only developed the character of Wikus Van De Merwe when Blomkamp was testing him for a possible starring role in District 9. The director planted the seed of a bureaucratic hero, but it was his old friend who turned Wikus into a full-fledged flower.
“[Blomkamp had] seen me in my normal life just pretending to be characters, you know, just messing around with people as particular types of characters with particular types of accents,” Copley says. “Going into Soweto and talking [in character] to the camera about [Wikus’] life, I just felt really comfortable doing that. Once I found the voice, the rest came.”
Though Blomkamp was aware of Copley’s talent for improvisation, he and producer Peter Jackson were taking a big risk by hiring a non-professional to star in Blomkamp’s first feature. “I had never in my life done heavy dramatic stuff, like crying and being very emotional,” the actor admits. “In a certain form you knew what was going to happen to [Wikus], but the exact tone was unknown. How moved would he be? How affected would he be? Would he still be joking around?”
Blomkamp’s gritty low-budget directing style helped Copley explore this side of his character. “It was such a realistic situation, through filming in real slums, having no green screens or blue screens and sitting with the real prosthetics on me.”
In the end, Wikus Van De Merwe recalls Gogolian drones like The Office’s David Brent, pencil pushers who are perfectly happy living a life of mediocrity. “I took [inspiration] from real life, which is what all those shows are doing,” Copley says. “Certainly in South Africa, this was a bureaucratic type of guy that I had come across. I always wanted a moustache because it was very fitting to that culture.”
Copley studied drama in high school, having discovered early on that he was interested in creating voices and characters. But an actual acting career on the big screen was never something he considered feasible. “I very quickly saw when I was studying that acting would be like trying to win a lottery ticket,” he says. “Any idea of being an actor just wasn’t in my head at all."
Instead, the actor moved into producing when he graduated. At 20, he met Neil Blomkamp, who was only 14 at the time. While Entertainment Weekly reports that Copley gave the young designer his first job, the former explains that it wasn’t as kosher as all that. “He was definitely not a proper hire, it was more like we were exploiting him,” Copley says, with a note of regret in his voice. “I didn’t pay him, although just the other day I actually paid him some money for it.”
Exploitation seems to be a recurring theme in Blomkamp's professional life. The director has revealed that District 9 is a metaphor for apartheid, the lawful system of racial segregation that was enforced by the South African government from 1948 to 1994. During this time, non-whites were deprived of most public services and removed by force from their residences. District 9 is allegedly based on District Six, a real inner-city area in Cape Town from which over 60,000 inhabitants were removed during the 70s.
Copley was only a child when the residents of District Six were being fumigated. The South African says he was a “sheltered” private school student. However, where many South African private schools were full of white kids (many of whom were rarely exposed to other races and religions), Copley's school was a multicultural British institution.
“My two best friends were a black guy and a Indian Hindu,” he says. “Their houses were very different from mine but our common values were that we were kids whose parents somehow made money. It was really only in the latter part of high school that my political awareness started.” That was when Copley realised that he and his friends were treated rather differently by white Afrikaners.
‘This black friend of mine was probably one of the most charming people I’ve ever known in my whole life. You’d watch him literally convert a person, right there in front of your eyes. I’d see a guy go: “Oh, so black people can actually be...wow,” ’ he says. “From that it’s easy to imagine an old conservative apartheid-supporting white Afrikaans guy in the old government days suddenly becoming black. What that would be like, it’s pretty obvious – his whole life would fall apart.”
District 9 opens across Canada this Friday.
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