I started acting before Pete Edochie, he isn’t Nollywood’s oldest – Bob-Manuel Udokwu

While acknowledging, in an interview with Gbam, that Edochie
is his senior in age, Udokwu argued that his own acting career began earlier.

The 58-year-old film star pointed to his role in the
groundbreaking 1992 film ‘Living in Bondage’ as the foundation of the modern
Nollywood industry, describing it as the project that “started the business”.

He argued that while Edochie, 78, was a celebrated star of
television series, he was not part of the pioneering film projects that shaped
the industry’s birth.

“Pete Edochie is not the oldest in Nollywood. I started
before Pete. He is older than me but he didn’t do the first Living in Bondage
with us,” he said.

“It’s ‘Living in Bondage’ that started the business. You are
not the one to say, you are not the one to choose that you are the oldest.

“You that is saying that you are the oldest, where is your
own? Who watched them? As we are talking now, some people are planning to
remake ‘Things Fall Apart’ to be a movie.

“What Pete did was TV series. Both those that bring the
money and those that act the movies didn’t study theatre art in the university.
When I see these things, I laugh.”

This marks the second time in recent weeks that a veteran
actor has made such a claim.

In July, Solade had argued that he is Edochie’s “industry
senior”.

He also maintained that the Yoruba film industry existed
before Nollywood but was overlooked due to poor media coverage and
documentation.

In 2023, Edochie revealed his acting debut was in the 1985
adaptation of Chinua Achebe’s best-selling novel ‘Things Fall Apart’.