SAM NEILL AND CARMEN EJOGO ON PLAYING JEFFERSON AND HEMINGS Leads Sam Neill and Carmen Ejogo from SALLY HEMINGS: AN AMERICAN SCANDAL, an epic four-hour mini-series about the extraordinary, controversial 38-year relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress, Sally Hemings, talk about preparing for and playing their respective roles as the famous founding father and president -- and his almost unknown slave mistress. The mini-series will be broadcast Sunday, Feb. 13 and Wednesday. Feb 16 (9:00-11:00 PM, ET/PT each night) on the CBS Television Network. Diahann Carroll, Mario Van Peebles and Mare Winningham also star in this romantic drama, which spans almost four decades of Hemings and Jefferson's life and illicit love affair. CARMEN EJOGO British actress Carmen Ejogo, who has starred in feature films such as "Metro," "The Avengers" and the upcoming Kenneth Branagh musical adaptation of William Shakespeare's "Love's Labor's Lost," will make her U.S. television debut as Sally Hemings. Despite her burgeoning film career, Ejogo found herself drawn to this character and television project for various reasons. "From an actor's point of view, it's a dream role. I play Sally from 15 through 53 or 54 (years of age). It is just an enormous time span to tackle. The development of her personality and the challenges she has to face are just tremendous as well." To prepare for the role, Ejogo tried to learn as much as possible about Sally and her relationship with Jefferson. "The 'scandal' of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is certainly not a story that I was taught in school," says Ejogo. "I was not aware of it at all until this project came to my attention.. It was not a part of history that was exposed." During her extensive research, Ejogo found very few historical references to Sally. As far as physical descriptions, the only two she encountered were that Sally was "mighty damn near white" and that she had "long flowing hair." Since information on Sally was so limited, Ejogo began to focus on Jefferson for inspiration for her role. "Understanding who Jefferson was as a man helped me determine what kind of personality Sally may have had that would have attracted him to her and allowed this relationship to occur. Also, Sally Hemings, the way I've chosen to play her, was partly defined from what I assume her life must have been like in terms of being a slave and a woman at that time. Even women of gentry lacked many rights. It was a difficult time, and obviously for slaves it was compounded. She had to have been a woman of great strength to have gone through the scandal. She probably had enemies from all quarters." Additionally, Ejogo credits her background as a key to connecting better with her character. "I'm also of mixed race (Scottish and Nigerian)... There are still certain issues that, unfortunately, I'm having to deal with -- that she probably had to deal with then. For me, of course, it's not nearly as bad, because I'm not a slave -- and I don't have (an African-American) slave history... But today there are still issues. You're not quite black enough to some people and not quite white enough to others. So, from that point of view, I just knew instinctively what some of the things she would have had to deal with probably were." During the course of the mini-series, Ejogo, as the young Sally, speaks a slave dialect of English, and, during and after Sally's time in Paris, she speaks a more refined English -- and a bit of French, too. Ejogo found that her British accent actually came in handy for the part. "When I was doing my research, I learned something very interesting about the (slave) dialect. When the slaves were brought over from Africa they were all mixed up. They weren't kept in tribes in which they could communicate. So they were forced to learn the language of their slave owners -- which, at the time, actually sounded much more similar to British and European languages than to the contemporary American accents. So, in fact, I have probably had an easier task in cracking the dialect than a lot of the American actors on this project." SAM NEILL "One of the great things about playing Jefferson is that he was wildly contradictory," explains New Zealand resident, Northern Ireland native Sam Neill "If you take, for instance, Jefferson and slavery -- and that is, in large part, what the film is about -- this was a man who was avowedly against slavery and attempted to introduce legislation that would do something about it. At the same time, this was a man who had hundreds of slaves and only emancipated five or so of them... This was a very complicated life with a lot of complicated little areas that were sometimes kept separate from one another" The angle by which the mini-series approaches Jefferson also intrigued Neill. "The script allowed me to explore a lot of Jefferson, but the emphasis is on his domestic life. It's not particularly about the political career of Jefferson or his scientific career -- what we're concerned about is his life at Monticello." Having visited the real Monticello on several occasions, Neill says it has an indescribable "spiritual dimension." In the case of playing a man of Jefferson's standing, he found that there were advantages and disadvantages "There's no actual documentary film of Jefferson for obvious reasons, so that gives you a certain amount of liberty. At the same time, there are very good descriptions of Jefferson --how he spoke and how he behaved. But, a lot of them, incidentally, are contradictory." Extensive research and reading were a must for Neill in readying himself for the role. He explains: "If you're doing something like this, you must do some sort of justice to the character --if for no other reason than that Jefferson is a much beloved character in American history... It's such an opportunity as an actor if you're playing a character with so much material that is known about him. To approach him from a position of ignorance would be stupidity. So the more work you can do in applying yourself to a part the better -- and there is a lot of work to be done on somebody like Jefferson. I hope I've given it a decent crack."