NEW YORK—In the wake of the massive racial turmoil engulfing the States, it’s tempting to frame a movie like Selma as capitalizing on current events. It is, after all, a film about Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) and his quest to secure the vote for African-Americans, with his fight culminating in the titular Alabama town.

Such thinking is, of course, cynical and just plain wrong. The Ava DuVernay–directed film was in production long before the streets of New York were rumbling with protests. It further helps that Selma, which opens Friday (January 9), is buoyed by two terrific performances and, as the Straight goes to press, a healthy 100-percent rating on the critic aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Oyelowo gives a hefty, exact portrayal of Dr. King and has already started reaping recognition for it. Carmen Ejogo matches Oyelowo’s meatier role with her performance as King’s oft-abandoned wife, Coretta.

At first glance, Ejogo definitely seems like a long shot to portray one of the most famous women in American history, principally because, like Oyelowo, she isn’t American. The London native knew the odds were stacked against her, but she had at least played Coretta before—in the 2001 HBO feature Boycott.

“I got the script and read it and realized this was going to be an incredible film and I had to do this, and the Coretta I’d be playing in this film would be very different from the one I played before,” says Ejogo in a private interview with the Straight in a Manhattan hotel room. “So I paid my ticket to go out to L.A. and meet her [director DuVernay] and audition. And it felt really good in the room but she didn’t give me the job. She met everyone else in town—every American actress, everyone—just to be sure that she had the right one. Then I finally got an email after a very angst-ridden week which was just a photograph of Coretta and a photograph of me next to it with the words ‘This is a dream come true.’ From Ava, directly. So that’s how I got the job.”

The stakes are certainly high with Selma, as it’s the first major motion picture made about King. The decision to cast a relative unknown like Ejogo in such a monumental role was obviously risky, even with her natural beauty and elegance, which are just as evident in person. Though she’s been excellent in her few big-screen appearances—as the unstable sister in the underrated Away We Go, for one—she doesn’t have the IMDb clout of many of her peers. But her portrayal of Coretta Scott King is enough to convince even the most hardened of viewers that she has a special connection with the character.

“No, that’s my pleasure, that’s my job, I think,” she answers when asked whether humanizing an icon is an especially intimidating job. “They [the Kings] are kind of mythological. But I think, to be honest, it’s more of a service to Coretta to recognize that she wasn’t born regal, she wasn’t born perfect. By deconstructing and looking behind the curtain, I think you end up ultimately with more reverence and more in awe of these characters, both her and Martin. At core, these were ordinary people just like the rest of the movement, and they just managed to live up to the expectations they had of themselves and that others had of them and do extraordinary things. But that, for me, is the great finesse of the film, that we all have leadership in us and it’s ordinary people that make things like this happen. It’s not a mythological demigod that we all get behind. Cult of personality? Not buying it. It’s us; it’s we, the people, that have to make the change happen.”