Omotola Jalade Ekeinde, aka ‘Omosexy’, is the queen of Nollywood. She’s appeared in more than 300 films, pulls in 150 million viewers for her reality-television show and has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
She scores a zero on the Hollywood Richter scale. She has never starred in a major motion picture. Her most recent film, Last Flight to Abuja, means nothing to devotees of Netflix andLoveFilm.
How she met her husband
At the age of 16 Omotola met her future husband, Matthew Ekeinde, then 26, in church. He was so keen on her that the day after their first meeting he showed up at her house unannounced.
“He soon became a friend of the family. He was almost like a father figure,” she says. “He’d drop my brothers at school and stuff.”
Ekeinde proposed when Omotola was 18. Initially, Omotola’s mother thought her daughter too young to marry, and asked Matthew to wait, but he refused. “She was really shocked,” says Omotola.
“She said, ‘If you want something badly enough you wait for it,’ but he said, ‘If I want something I take it.’ He was very, very bold. It was one of the things I found fascinating about him.”
They had two wedding ceremonies, the second of which took place on a flight from Lagos to Benin. “He’s amazing. If I weren’t married to him I couldn’t see myself with anybody else. I’m a handful.”
Ekeinde has become a reluctant poster boy for a new kind of African man.
“A lot of men come up to him and say, ‘You’re a real man – I can’t believe how you deal with it all.’ He also gets a lot of invitations from various bodies to speak about how he copes as a modern Nigerian man in a relationship with a powerful working woman.”
The name Omosexy
Many of her fans think her real name is “Omosexy”, she tells me, laughing, when we finally get to speak, but it was a nickname given to her by her husband, an airline pilot.
“He bought me a car back in 2009, and that was the plate number,” she recalls, speaking with kinetic, girlish excitement, rattling off sentences in fast, extended flurries.
“All my cars have special plate numbers, like Omotola 1.” When I ask how many cars she has, she laughs again, with embarrassment. “A few.” When she first saw her personalised licence plate she was horrified. “I thought, ‘Oh no!’ It sounded cockyAs if I was telling everybody, ‘I’m sexy!’ Y’know-wha-I-mean?” She punctuates her sentences with this phrase, which she reels off as a single word.
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