David Oyelowo joins cast of ‘Americanah’

David Oyelowo, with a brand new Golden Globe Award nomination for his performance as Martin Luther King Jr. in “Selma,” has signed on to costar in “Americanah,” the feature film adaptation of the novel by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie.

The film also stars Lupita Nyong’o, who won the best supporting actress Oscar for her role in “Twelve Years a Slave.”

Variety describes the story of “Americanah” as being about “a pair of young Nigerian immigrants who face a lifetime of struggle while their relationship endures.”

The screenplay may have drifted a bit from the book; that description doesn’t fully reflect the novel, which won the National Book Critics Award for fiction. The book puts the female character, Nigerian American academic-turned-blogger Ifemelu, at the center of its love-story narrative, and is also full of humor.

“I feel as though being African, I can laugh at certain things that maybe if I were African American I wouldn’t. I don’t know race in the way an African American knows race,” Adichie told The Times last year. “Sometimes it takes an outsider to see something about your own reality that you don’t.”

“I wanted Ifemelu to be a character who wasn’t easy to like,” she added. “I think it’s a very feminist book -- I think all of my work is very feminist. She just refuses to keep quiet. In a way that in my life I think I refuse to as well.”

Adichie’s feminist views were catapulted into the spotlight when Beyonce sampled the author’s TED talk for her song “Flawless.”

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