This role was a shoe-in

GIVING a great audition doesn’t necessarily mean an actor will get the part. Sometimes a performer has to do something special to set himself apart from the crowd.

Such was the case with Chiwetel Ejiofor when he auditioned for the role of a sassy transvestite performer in the British film “Kinky Boots.” He was the only actor who wore a woman’s wig during his reading.

The fact the actor decided to wear the Naomi Campbell-style locks impressed director Julian Jarrold. “He really put himself out there,” Jarrold said.

But for Ejiofor, wearing the wig “seemed logical to me. I wanted him to see me in that way. Even if you did the best sort of reading in the world, I felt like how could he judge how it would work” with the actor in drag.

Inspired by a true story, “Kinky Boots,” which opens Friday, revolves around a young Englishman named Charlie (Joel Edgerton) who inherits his father’s failing shoe factory in Northampton.

Salvation comes in the form of Lola (Ejiofor), a brash Soho female impersonator who needs more comfortable 4 1/2 -inch-heeled boots: Charlie teams up with Lola to design a line of shoes made for transvestites, drag queens and transgender males.

Looking somewhat like a beefed-up Diana Ross, Lola is self-confident and witty onstage -- almost masculine. Offstage and out of makeup, Lola is actually Simon, who is shy, quiet and unsure of himself.

“Simon is unable to express all the kind of masculine traits that his father wanted him to have,” said Ejiofor, 31. “But somehow he can do it as Lola. He can be forthright.”

The British actor, best known for his role as a Nigerian immigrant doctor in 2002’s “Dirty Pretty Things” and currently playing Denzel Washington’s bemused partner in “Inside Man,” waxed his eyebrows and body hair and donned acrylic nails to play Lola.

“It was interesting,” he said, relaxing recently in his Beverly Hills hotel suite. “There was a definite change in perspective for me. Initially, I went to great pains to sort of explain to people that I was doing a movie and that was why I had done the eyebrows and nails.”

But as the production progressed, Ejiofor became defensive over his appearance. “I felt, why should I explain? ... I felt it was really useful and a great lesson for me about what living a character can bring to a characterization. If you are physically still involved and of that mind-set when you go home, it brings out completely different and interesting texture” to the character.

COSTAR Edgerton recalled the first time he saw the actor dressed as Lola. “It was just, like, wow! I had had a warmup to it because he already had fake nails and his eyebrows had been plucked, but nothing kind of prepared me for seeing him the first time coming out of the trailer and walking on the set wearing a satin outfit.”

Even more of a surprise for Edgerton was that Ejiofor suddenly was taller than he was. “Chiwetel is my height,” said Edgerton, who is slightly under 6 feet. “But then adding 4 1/2 -inch heels.... Instead of being a woman and shorter than me, he was a woman and heaps taller than me.”

Edgerton said Ejiofor was the one actor he’s worked with “who intuitively knows where to pitch the performance. There are a lot of aspects of an actor on set, and he is very easy to get along with as a person, which means the atmosphere on set is always light and efficient.”

Though Ejiofor could give Carmen Miranda a run for her money when it comes to wearing high heels, the actor admits it took a lot of training to strut the stage in his flashy red boots.

“I always knew that the legend has it that high heels are hard to walk in,” he said. “Certainly by the look of them one would feel that is true. But I never really processed that in any kind of real sense until the first very time I put 4 1/2 -inch heels on. Then I realized there was a whole world that I somehow bypassed. So I scheduled in many, many rehearsal and choreography lessons.”

Ejiofor has to belt out several songs in the movie, including “Whatever Lola Wants” and “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”

“I didn’t know how good of a singer he would be,” Jarrold said. And neither did Ejiofor, who hadn’t sung since doing a musical play when he was a teenager.

Still, Ejiofor said, “I never felt she had to be the greatest singer. She had to be very confident.”

The production bused in transvestites from all around England to pepper the club audience when he performed.

“It was a difficult audience,” Jarrold said. But Ejiofor quickly won them over.

“It was very important to get the approval of the people there,” Ejiofor said. “I think initially they were sort of skeptical, whether it was going to be a sendup or a spoof. I think very quickly they realized we were trying to represent the real-life elements and heightened it to make it a little magical. We certainly weren’t trying to get a cheap laugh out of it.”