“IT WOULD have taken much longer to get to this point, if not for Tsotsi,” Presley Chweneyagae says about the combination of good luck and hard work in turning acting into a career.
Born in Mafikeng in 1984, Chweneyagae relocated to Pretoria “for a bright future”, which he found when his first feature film acting role led to an Oscar-winning film.
“I always had a wild imagination about me being in a film. I used to walk in a particular way, hoping someone was filming me. It was great, being in that film,” said Chweneyagae.
Up until Tsotsi his acting experience lay on the stage. When he won the award for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role for Tsotsi at the Black Movie Awards in Los Angeles in 2006, he had had to withdraw from the UK tour of the play Relativity: Township Stories which he had co-written with Paul Grootboom.
Over the years he has kept up a screen presence. Since Tsotsi he has worked as a militant prisoner on Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013); an illegal miner in Zama Zama (2012); in The Gentleman (2011); Khalo Matabane’s State of Violence (2010); Menda City (2009); More Than Just a Game (2007) and the TV series When We Were Black (2006).
Last year he toured with Aubrey Sekhabi’s stage play Silent Voice, playing a hijacker on the run, and he was the good cop in Donovan Marsh’s heist action movie iNumber Number, which was been renamed Avenged for an American audience.
When he isn’t on stage or in front of a camera, you will find him focusing on his Presley Chweneyagae Foundation. Based in Pretoria, it was started two years ago to use the arts as a development tool in disadvantaged communities, working with teenagers and sometimes adults. Right now he’s working on a programme that will focus on street people in the North West, Mpumalanga and Free State provinces.
“We want to audition people who are on the street, give them a space to live and work, talk to them, motivate them and then, based on their stories, we want to build a musical theatre show. We are in discussion with the National Lotteries Board about funding.”
He does still keep up with the writing for stage, and most recently has been working on a play which was presented at schools in rural areas, based on the concept of sanitary education.
“Yes, a lot of people recognise me because of the film work, but what’s also important for me is that they see me as just a person. So, when I motivate them I tell them my own personal story so they can relate to the possibility of achieving if you just believe that you can do it. It is very fulfilling for me. I always said I want to do meaningful work, and this is meaningful for me.”
At the moment it’s auditions, writing and there’s some “stuff in the pipeline. We’re also looking at filming for tv… something that might become a TV series.”