I Didn’t Plan To Become An Actor – Nkem Owoh

Veteran Nollywood actor Nkem Owoh has revealed that he never planned to become a movie star. He recently had his say while speaking on the Selah Meditate podcast, and fans have been reacting.

Disclosing that he was content working behind the scenes for so many years, Nkem shared that he only stepped in front of the camera after persistent encouragement from his colleagues.

The 71-year-old added that he started out as a scriptwriter until the people around him urged him to try performing.

His words, “My coming in front of the camera was an accident. I was a scriptwriter behind the scenes and people started telling me to start performing in front of the camera. I remember ATV created a 7-minute programme for me to do stand-up comedy in the 80s.

They told me to come in front of the camera because I was making people laugh behind the camera. With much pressure, I came in front of the camera. And I saw that what I was doing people were buying it so that was how my acting career began.

Fame took away my freedom. A lot of people want to be celebrities, they only know the benefits but not the downsides. When you become famous you can’t do a lot of the things you were doing freely before. You become restricted in a lot of ways.”

WOW.

Nollywood is a sobriquet that originally referred to the Nigerian film industry. The origin of the term dates back to the early 2000s, traced to an article in The New York Times. Due to the history of evolving meanings and contexts, there is no clear or agreed-upon definition for the term, which has made it a subject to several controversies.

The origin of the term “Nollywood” remains unclear; Jonathan Haynes traced the earliest usage of the word to a 2002 article by Matt Steinglass in the New York Times, where it was used to describe Nigerian cinema.

Charles Igwe noted that Norimitsu Onishi also used the name in a September 2002 article he wrote for the New York Times. The term continues to be used in the media to refer to the Nigerian film industry, with its definition later assumed to be a portmanteau of the words “Nigeria” and “Hollywood”, the American major film hub.

Film-making in Nigeria is divided largely along regional, and marginally ethnic and religious lines. Thus, there are distinct film industries – each seeking to portray the concern of the particular section and ethnicity it represents. However, there is the English-language film industry which is a melting pot for filmmaking and filmmakers from most of the regional industries.