When he first saw “Maleficent,” Chiewetel Ejiofor was struck.

The 2014 film was Disney’s return to the same fairy tale terrain it had covered generations prior in 1959’s “Sleeping Beauty,” with the perspective shifted to that of the former story’s villain. Now played by Angelia Jolie, Maleficent was a mightily powerful fairy with tragedy in her past and pain in her heart.

"It really made me think deeply about certain ideas that I had, and things that I had grown up with, this idea of wicked witches and so forth, and how those kinds of tropes get into a mindset and how that influences your mindset as you become an adult,” said Ejiofor.

It was those considerations over how characters evolve with nuance away from a good/evil binary that interested Ejiofor going into his work on the sequel “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil,” in theaters Oct. 18.

“Young people do absorb all of this information in a really kind of interesting and kind of ferocious way, and it does have its part to play in having these conversations and moving these conversations in a positive and healthy and kind of engaged way,” said Ejiofor.

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Picking up years after its predecessor, “Mistress of Evil” finds the relationship strained between Jolie’s Maleficent and goddaughter Aurora, played by Elle Fanning, amidst Aurora’s imminent wedding to a charming prince.

Michelle Pfeiffer is Queen Ingrith, Aurora’s mother-in-law-to-be, and Ejiofor appears as Conall, one of the leaders of the exiled group of winged creatures known as the dark fey and an advocate for peace between the species.

Director Joachim Rønning’s film, with so many different entities at play with deeply held convictions of their own, uses its fantastical setting to grapple with quite timely questions of how a divided population can help to move forward together.

"I think that it is important right now, for all of us in the media and in the creative arts, to really look at that, because we are in complex times, we are in difficult times,” said Ejiofor. “And I think media does have a responsibility to reflect that and to point to ways in which those conversations can be had. And they start in a kind of micro way, don't they? And then they become part of our structure, our social structure.”

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The London native Ejiofor, 42, is an Academy Award nominee for "12 Years a Slave" (2013), as well as an Emmy nominee and four-time Golden Globe nominee who's recently appeared in blockbusters including "The Martian" (2015) and "Doctor Strange" (2016).

Many of the big themes present in "Mistress of Evil" — "community, integration, families, family you choose, family you have" as well as the nature of leadership and sacrifice, as Ejiofor put it — are also present in his other big success for Dinsey in 2019, "The Lion King."

In that re-visitation of the studio's 1994 animated classic, Ejiofor voiced the antagonistic usurper, Scar. There is power to be found, Ejiofor said, in re-examining the motivations of individuals like Scar or Maleficent who have traditionally been written off as villains.

"We don't necessarily have to have sympathy, but if we have empathy and we can understand where people are coming from, then we can understand how to rectify certain circumstances with a bit more kind of alacrity and with sort of a fullness of heart," he said.

It's a means of countering what the actor described as "a certain incredible tendency to retreat into our own specific camps where we only know these sort of ideas of how to attack or belittle those who don't agree with us."

"To sort of widen that net a little bit, I think examining villains is a wonderful way of doing that, of opening up conversation, of opening up understanding, of opening up empathy and that being a way of actually sort of progressing ideas that we all can combine over," he said.

"Maleficent: Mistress of Evil," 118 minutes, rated PG, opens in theaters on Friday, Oct. 18, movies.disney.com/maleficent-mistress-of-evil.

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