Chiwetel Ejiofor as Frank Wills in Spike Lee’s She Hate Me (2004)

Years before Chiwetel Ejiofor was an Oscar nominee for 12 Years a Slave, he spent part of 2004 in one of the strangest films on his résumé. In Spike Lee’s She Hate Me he plays Frank Wills, the real security guard who reported the Watergate break-in. It is a small, dreamlike part inside a very large and chaotic movie.

That contrast is why the film turns up when people look back at the earlier work of actors who later won awards attention. She Hate Me divided critics sharply, and Ejiofor’s thread is one of the most discussed oddities in it. The role is brief, but it is the film’s historical anchor.

Who Frank Wills is in the story

The film follows Jack Armstrong (Anthony Mackie), a pharmaceutical executive who turns whistleblower and loses his job and standing. Variety described the picture as a sprawling social satire about the American dream. Lee wrote the screenplay with Michael Genet, from a story by Genet.

Wills is how Lee gives Jack’s fall a precedent. Variety noted that Lee casts Jack as the spiritual descendant of the guard who first reported the break-in. Wills later died penniless, while the conspirators profited from book deals and radio work. Jack’s father Geronimo (Jim Brown) is the character who makes that link in the story.

The scenes people remember

Wills does not appear in a conventional subplot. Ejiofor appears in fantasy-flashback sequences, and the film stages the Watergate events on screen in a heightened way. Reverse Shot described a vignette in which Wills is ringed by caricatured versions of Ehrlichman, Haldeman and Liddy, with a Nixon-masked ringleader at the center.

Critics reacted to these scenes very differently. Roger Ebert called the Wills material a free-standing sidebar and admitted that it came from left field. He nevertheless defended Lee’s choices as deliberate. Reverse Shot saw it as the most extraneous part of the film and, in the same breath, the part that made the film feel like a carnival ride.

The look of the film is part of the craft. Matthew Libatique shot it on Super 16mm. Production design was by Brigitte Broch and costumes by Donna Berwick. Terence Blanchard supplied a score built on bluesy riffs around a patriotic main theme, according to Variety.

The performance

Ejiofor’s job is to make an almost allegorical figure feel like a person. Wills is presented as an earnest professional whose diligence one night at the Watergate complex led to obscurity and hardship. One review described the film as reconstructing “the forgotten tale” in dreamlike and then realistic terms. Ejiofor plays him straight against the satire around him, and that restraint is what keeps the thread from tipping into caricature.

He was also working among a large ensemble. The cast includes Woody Harrelson, John Turturro, Monica Bellucci, Ellen Barkin, Brian Dennehy, Kerry Washington and Ossie Davis. Variety called the ensemble superb and singled out Lonette McKee, Brown and Mackie for praise.

How the film was received

The film’s reception was famously split. Variety called it “flawed but fascinating” and predicted that Lee’s controversy would not translate into box office. Ebert, writing on August 6, 2004, expected scorched-earth reviews and then argued the film was audacious, a movie that dared its audience to react. Other critics found it overextended, with too many ideas competing in a running time of 138 minutes.

Later writing has kept the argument going. Some retrospectives treat it as one of the most baffling films by a major director, while others read it as intentional provocation. Either way, Ejiofor’s section is cited in almost every discussion because it is the part that links Lee’s story to real history.

Where it sat in Ejiofor’s career

2004 was a busy year for him. He had won the Best Actor prize at the British Independent Film Awards for Dirty Pretty Things (2002). Britannica and other reference sources list She Hate Me, Red Dust and Melinda and Melinda among his 2004 films. It was the first time he worked with Lee, and he later reunited with the director on Inside Man (2006).

The decade that followed brought Kinky Boots and Children of Men. His performance as Solomon Northup in 12 Years a Slave (2013) earned an Academy Award nomination and the BAFTA for Best Actor. His 2019 debut as a feature director was The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

His recent work is a long way from Lee’s satire. He plays Clark in A24’s horror film Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons and released in the United States on May 29, 2026. By September 2026 it was streaming on HBO Max, where Slashfilm reported it as the service’s biggest streaming hit. Deadline reported on February 4, 2026 that he would also appear in Mike Flanagan’s new The Exorcist.

Seen against that career, his Frank Wills is an early case of what he does well. He takes a small role with a heavy idea attached and commits to it fully. The film around him remains one of Lee’s most argued-over.

Header photo: Kevin Payravi / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, modified: resized and blended with an AI-generated background. The person in the header is a real photo; only the background is AI-generated.