Nollywood actor Lateef Adedimeji has explained how his crying character in movies started. He recently had his say while speaking with Morayo Afolabi Brown, and fans have been reacting.
Narrating how people used to refer to him as that guy who looks like Odunlade Adekola, Lateef stated that he decided to share his crying talent with the world to stand out.
The moviestar added that people eventually started identifying him as the crying machine without even knowing his name.
His words, “At some point, people started calling me the crying machine. They don’t know my name, but they describe me as that guy that cries a lot in movies.
When I came into the entertainment industry, people used to call me that guy that looks like Odunlade, but I wanted people to know me for a particular thing, hence my crying talent.
The Iya Peju character started in lockdown, and it wasn’t something I took seriously until people started asking for more.”
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.
