NEW YORK — If the world comes to an end, don’t expect Chiwetel Ejiofor to hand you a lifeline.

“I’d be very choosy. It would just be family and close friends. Sorry, dude, it’s a short list,” Ejiofor says with a laugh.

Ejiofor, 35, plays presidential science adviser Adrian Helmsley in the environmental-disaster epic “2012,” which was tops at the weekend box office. While shooting the film, Ejiofor picked up a few pointers about weathering a major global collapse.

“Keep a survival guide handy, because you never know. And my advice is: canned peaches. Canned peaches are very good. They last a long time, and they’re very good food to have in the apocalypse,” he said.

Ejiofor isn’t exactly gifted at extolling his own virtues and artistic gifts. He’d prefer to let his work speak for itself.

His performance as a drag queen in the 2005 comedy “Kinky Boots” — which earned him a Golden Globe nomination — was singled out by Roger Ebert, who praised Ejiofor for “taking a character bundled with stereotypes, clearing them out of the way, and finding a direct line to who the character really is.”

His stage work has been acclaimed, including his 2007 turn as Othello in the Donmar Warehouse production in London. Ejiofor, opined John Lahr in The New Yorker, “brings to the character a natural nobility and a decency that are a kind of poetic revelation.”

The London native, who has played everything from a Nigerian doctor forced to work as a cabdriver in 2002’s “Dirty Pretty Things” to a ruthless villain in 2007’s “American Gangster,” now calls Los Angeles home.

“I’ve sold my soul. It’s warm and sunny. I was born in (London) and raised in (London). There’s a lot to be said for parks. There’s a lot to be said for not walking up stairs,” he says.