Nollywood actor Emeka Ike in his recent interview with Yes magazine, spoke about his acting career and his days of struggling to meet up with daily life in school. He also talked about reasons why most Nollywood actors remain poor irrespective of money they make from movie. Read interview below:
Q: What is the nicest thing that acting has done for you?
It has made me opulent, it has upgraded my status. What has acting not done for you? Acting has not given me God. It took away a bit of God from me and I’m a Godly person, and I think I have to go back to that part of my life.
Q: What don’t you like about stardom?
Stardom abuses you, it violates your real personality, it makes you an international object to be criticized and to be standardized. People can make assumptions and assertions about you, so it puts you up there to be a yardstick. Most people in your line of business attain success, but find it difficult to sustain it.
Q: What is responsible for that?
I think background matters a lot. Where you are coming from means a whole lot. Now, if you are coming from a background where you understand what it takes to be successful, I think it will be part of you. But if you come from a background where you struggle to get things, you keep struggling. I think the background matters.
Q: Most people speak well of you, especially in terms of investing wisely, how did you come about the knowledge of investment?
I had a business centre as a student at Yaba Tech. If you go to Akata, which is the girls’ hostel, I was that boy that had that business centre by the entrance; by the porter’s lodge. Go and ask, I owned that business centre there as a student. You see, I come from an enterprising home. My mother used to sell, so she believes in replicating her money to get so many things going. So, because I saw her replicate small money and it was able to buy her buses, it was able to build her a house in Lagos, it was able to build her a house in the village, I knew that I can also do small, small businesses. In fact, right now, I want to do N10, N10 business (Laughs). You can imagine doing N10, N10 business in one million places. That’s the way I was brought up and that’s why I said initially that where you are coming from has a lot to add to your future.
Q: Most of your colleagues hardly invest; can you hazard any reason for that?
Because plenty of them are carried away by their faces. But you see, the face is nothing. It’s a process and when you are in the process, it’s like acquiring a CV. We didn’t have all that CV before now, so when you get the CV, you need to reinvent the CV, you need to recycle the CV into something of greater capacity. So, if you don’t know what to do with the CV, you’ve missed it. It’s not just about going on red carpet and being the best at whatever party is going on…
Q: You also happen to be one of the few actors who veered into movie production a long time ago, how did you come to that realization?
We actually wanted to challenge Hollywood then. That was my idea. The way we were growing then, we were actually making the movies to look Hollywood in the face and I thought we got there before we were sidelined by politics. So, there was that interest, there was that inert interest – I wanna do this; oh, I love this; oh, I can do it like this; now I can add this. I used helicopters! You remember? Now, that helicopter, to use it took me one year. In between someone’s budget! It now accumulated so much money. It now tells you that maybe I’m a perfectionist. Maybe I believe we can get it right. I believe we can just add one and one together, like the engineer that I am, and get a good product. So, that was what happened then. You stopped producing after that. When should we expect your new movie as a producer? Very soon. Let’s say in another two months or a month from now, you will watch one movie; it’s a project movie, it’s not my movie. It’s my company’s movie for Amnesty people. My students that I trained in Ghana; they felt I was supposed to do a project for them and then the project; I
decided to blow it up and they chose a very good topic. And that’s what I taught them – not to always look at the fickle things of life. They chose malaria and the way we treated malaria, anybody that watches the movie will know that I can prevent malaria. So, that’s the kind of stories I wanna tell and with the latest format in Hollywood.
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