Lawmen: Bass Reeves SAG Screening Q&A…

During the 2024 television awards season while promoting Lawmen: Bass Reeves for consideration, during a Screen Actors Guild special screening of the 2023 Paramount+ series, Screen Actors Guild Awards nominees Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo held a Question & Answer session after the screening. DuVernay moderated the interview session where she talks with Lawmen: Bass Reeves star and executive producer Oyelowo about his role as the iconic lawman Bass Reeves.

Oyelowo discusses everything from his earlier roles in his career before he was the leading man of any film, or series with DuVernay, but not before he tells the audience in attendance how he first met DuVernay. Oyelowo then discusses how he moved to Los Angeles from London when the script from Selma arrived at his door and was being directed by none other than DuVernay. It would be their first collaboration together, and the film would make Oyelowo a household name after playing civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches.

Oyelowo then goes on to discuss how far he’s come in his career being named an executive producer for Lawmen: Bass Reeves, and what it means in film versus television. Oyelowo goes on to discuss with DuVernay and the audience about how impactful it is, especially as a black actor. He then goes on to discuss what it meant to play such an iconic lawmen of the Wild West, and the fact that he was one of the first African American US Marshals west of the Mississippi River. What it meant to finally tell this untold story in a history that has often overlooked the contributions of African Americans and Indigenous people that were part of the formation the American West. He discusses how the history, his leading role in the series, and the history of inequality with black people all comes full circle in his representation in the film as not only an actor, but an executive producer.

You can watch the Q & A interview with Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo below:

Lawmen: Bass Reeves is available now on Paramount+…