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It took a while for us to figure out who Chiwetel Ejiofor was, we have to admit. We would see his name -- that complicated assortment of consonants -- in movie credits, and it would stick, because it's not exactly Bob Parr; it's not like there's likely to be another guy, in a few years, having to join SAG as "Chiwetel P. Ejiofor" to distinguish himself, you know? But even as we kept walking out of the cinemas wondering who that gorgeous man was, it wouldn't click that the lovely musician of colour with the sweater anachronistically draped over his shoulders in Melinda And Melinda was played by the same actor who made the silky-voiced villain of colour so creepy in Serenity. We can't think of another performer who's so completely transformed by just a little bit of a goatee. (Maybe if Amanda Bynes had tried one in She's The Man, she might have looked more like the guy she was trying to pass for instead of the gender-dysphoric girl she ended up.)

But...seriously. It took until the current Inside Man for us to connect all the dots -- and dude had been in a bunch of movies, by then, that we had seen. Maybe we could be forgiven for not twigging back when we first saw him, in Love Actually, given that he was sharing the film with approximately 83% of Britain's working actors. And Melinda And Melinda was confusing, with the cutting back and forth from the comic storyline to the tragic, and there are few enough non-white people in Woody Allen's movies that the director himself may not have identified Ejiofor as distinct from the movie's only other actor of colour, Daniel Sunjata. (After all, he did make them both tie sweaters around their necks, for Christ's sake.) And even though Ejiofor's haircut, clean-shaven-ness, and accent were identical in both Love Actually and Serenity, he was so busy being all evil in the latter that the performance hardly called to mind his sweet newlywed in the former. Besides which the former was pretty forgettable anyway, no matter how handsome he was in it (which: very).

Ultimately, it doesn't matter how dense or unobservant we are: casting directors have recognized what a fine addition Chiwetel Ejiofor can be to many kinds of movie ensembles, from taut and twisty cop dramas (Inside Man) to multicultural revenge stories (Four Brothers). And now he's been handed probably his biggest role yet in Kinky Boots. It's another one of those cutesy British movies where working-class people twit around in smocks, banding together to achieve some kind of un-British goal. Not nude posing to raise money to fight cancer (that was Calendar Girls), nor growing pot to supplement a widow's income (Saving Grace), nor stripping (The Full Monty), though we can certainly understand why they'd all run together in your mind like so much trifle: in this case, a venerable yet impoverished shoe factory reinvents itself making sexy footwear for drag queens, and Ejiofor plays the workers' cross-dressing sensei. Drag queens are kind of passé, we agree, but Ejiofor makes us want to see how it comes out. At least this time -- when he's labouring under forty pounds of wig and six inches of platform heels -- we'll probably be able to pick out which one he is.