After 22 years in the movie industry, Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde, Nollywood actress, who was among the 2013 Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, has surely made her mark as an actress. 

In a recent chat, the actress emphatically stated that all she has in the industry are colleagues and never close friends. She explained further that she’s not in the habit of having new friends, at every opportunity, saying, all her close friends are those she has known from her childhood. “Most of my friends are friends I have had forever.

I am a very loyal person. I try to keep a very small group of friends. It is not that I don’t make new friends, but I call them acquaintances. When you say friends, they are people I have known for a long time,since I was a child,” she said, poker faced: “Everybody is my colleague. I don’t have very close friends in the industry,” she added. When asked why, she explained: “We don’t live around each other to start with. I live  very far away from so many people.

Secondly,I am not too much of a party person. We probably won’t see often. I am also not very good at visiting people, so, we probably won’t have that kind of bond.” Omotola, who recently celebrated one of her daughters, Mimi who graduated from the university with Associates of Art degree in Merchandise Product Development returned to big screen in a new movie ‘Alter Ego’ on July 21.

Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde,

What made you accept Alter Ego script? 

Every story has a soul, some come to you quickly and some writers don’t understand that and then they give it to you at the end of the movie. The movie got me on time. I have a very short attention span, I don’t like to waste my time so if the movie doesn’t get to me in the first 20 pages, I might not read it to the end because it will be too much for me. With Alter Ego script, I understood what they were trying to achieve from the onset and I loved it but it was a diamond in the rough. I knew what we could do with it so I called the director and I said, “I see where you are going with this movie and I think it would be great but we are going to have to tear it and rebuild it. Are you ready?” A lot of filmmakers don’t want to do that but he agreed on the condition that I was also involved.