Ben-Adir, Kingsley

Subterms

    Latest story

    75 Shares179 Views

    How Kingsley Ben-Adir Became Bob Marley

    by

    Despite little outward resemblance, the actor worked for months to get the look, sound and movement right for the new film “Bob Marley: One Love.”Bob Marley, the beloved and singular reggae luminary, was a dreadlocked Rastafarian from Jamaica who sang and played guitar. Kingsley Ben-Adir is a Brit with close-cropped hair who doesn’t sing or play guitar, and stands seven inches taller than Marley did. Despite the lack of external similarities, Ben-Adir was cast as Marley in a new Hollywood biopic, the culmination of a yearlong search for the right actor.“We tried to find someone from Jamaica who could speak the dialect we needed,” said Ziggy Marley, Bob Marley’s oldest son as well as a Grammy-winning musician, and a producer on “Bob Marley: One Love,” which opened in theaters on Feb. 14. But physical verisimilitude, he decided, wasn’t the key to portraying his father: “Kingsley brought an emotional depth that nobody else brought to the auditions, and a magnetism,” he added.The choice of Ben-Adir has been denounced by many Jamaicans, who point out that at least since 1990s films like “Cool Runnings” and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” Hollywood has been using non-Jamaican actors with diluted accents. “We were not meant to have agency over our narratives,” Danae Peart wrote in RiddimStyle Magazine, which covers culture in the Black diaspora. She added that Hollywood executives are obsessed with “making everything palatable for the ‘white gaze.’”Reviews for “Bob Marley: One Love” have been almost uniformly negative, but even some of the harshest critics have praised Ben-Adir’s performance. “In a film that mostly sticks to reliable formula, he is one thing to love,” Olly Richards of Empire wrote. Recently, Ben-Adir explained in detail how he made the transformation, despite little outward resemblance to Marley.Landing the RoleZiggy Marley, left, with Ben-Adir on set. “Kingsley brought an emotional depth that nobody else brought to the auditions, and a magnetism,” Marley said.Chiabella James/Paramount Pictures“On the audition tape, I knew that my Jamaican patois was going to be basic and wrong,” Ben-Adir, a lean, alert 37-year-old dressed in a dark Adidas track suit, said during an interview in a Times Square conference room. He chose one scene from among three he’d been sent, and had only two days to prep his audition — not enough time to nail the accent. “Working actors don’t have the luxury of time and space.” He crammed by studying “Live at the Rainbow,” a Marley concert video shot in 1977.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Bob Marley: One Love’ Review: Mostly Positive Vibes

      by

      This patchy biopic lauds the Marley of dormitory posters, a snapshot of a lifestyle hero who is always the coolest guy in the room.Bob Marley was an enigma, a fascinatingly flawed idealist as most interesting figures are. Born into poverty in Nine Mile, Jamaica, the young Marley had weak singing pipes but a stubborn drive to be heard. He forged himself into the voice of his island and beyond, belting reggae anthems that have become hymnals to the world’s downtrodden, as well as anyone who likes a good groove. He died in 1981 at the age of 36 before he had to witness his legacy undergo a tough cross-examination. Did Marley’s generosity to strangers balance out his dismissal of women? Did his own painful childhood pardon him for being a distant father? Did his sincere proclamations of peace and unity accomplish anything — and is it fair of us to expect that they should?Such grappling is justified, although it wouldn’t be pleasant for anyone. Reinaldo Marcus Green’s patchy and unsatisfying biopic “Bob Marley: One Love” doesn’t even try. It lauds the Marley of dormitory posters, a snapshot of a lifestyle hero who is always the coolest guy in the room. At most, the movie takes his image from flat to lenticular. If you never got to see Marley move, Kingsley Ben-Adir is a fine simulacrum.The problem is the script, credited to Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers, Zach Baylin and Green. Smartly, the writers avoid the standard birth-to-grave template to focus on two years in London, where Marley, a pacifist, survived a surge in election-year violence, even when gunmen shot up his house, injuring him and three others. But the film doesn’t have much to say about his time in exile. Was Marley feeling betrayed by his country? Was he homesick? How was he handling his ascension to international superstardom? When Marley and his buddies from the Wailers (who are presented as a doting throng, not as individuals) check out the Clash, we can’t even tell if they’re having fun. (For the curious, the real Marley vibed with punk rock, saying, “Punks are outcasts from society. So are the Rastas.”)Occasionally, we see random flashbacks. The best involve Marley’s relationship with Rita, his wife and backup singer, who is played as a teen by Nia Ashi and in adulthood by a compelling Lashana Lynch, before their outside dalliances reroute their marriage into what’s portrayed onscreen as a chaste, tender loyalty. The rest are missed opportunities for insight into the man.According to personal accounts in Roger Steffen’s first-rate biography “So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley,” the singer’s mother was uncomfortable that her son was half-white and, when she remarried, made the boy sleep underneath the house apart from her new family; here, she’s merely a blurry figure cradling young Marley to her bosom.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Breakthrough Year Didn’t Come Easily

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe ProjectionistKingsley Ben-Adir’s Breakthrough Year Didn’t Come EasilyPlaying Malcolm X in “One Night in Miami” is a dream realized for the British actor, but drama school didn’t prepare him for all the disappointments along the way.Ben-Adir has been the subject of awards chatter for his turn as Malcolm X.Credit…Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesFeb. 24, 2021Updated 3:43 p.m. ETOver the past year, all the pieces finally began to fit together for Kingsley Ben-Adir.Foremost among them was the British actor’s breakthrough performance as Malcolm X in Regina King’s “One Night in Miami,” in which he movingly mines the human, vulnerable side of an icon. But there were also roles as varied as Barack Obama in “The Comey Rule” and Zoë Kravitz’s love interest in “High Fidelity.” And then, the most unambiguous sign of “making it”: Ben-Adir even popped up as a character played by guest host Regé-Jean Page on the latest “Saturday Night Live.”But this sudden rush of attention, success and awards buzz is a heady development for Ben-Adir, who had begun to question everything about his approach to acting only three years ago. “I felt like I was just making it up as I was going along, sometimes hitting and sometimes missing,” the 35-year-old actor said on video chat from his home in London. “And I really got to a point where I won’t say what show it was, but I saw something I had done on television and I felt so depressed by the work. I was like, ‘Is that it? All of the work that went into it, and that’s what it was?’”Raised on a steady diet of “Inside the Actors Studio” episodes — “I’ve seen every one of those two or three times,” he said — the London-born Ben-Adir expected his passion for acting to be stoked at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which he graduated from in 2011. Instead, Ben-Adir got a stiff, technical education meant mainly to prepare him for big British stages. “The training that I had and the training that I dreamed about, they were two completely different things,” he said.Ben-Adir as Malcolm X in a scene from “One Night in Miami.”Credit…Patti Perret/Amazon StudiosThat left Ben-Adir feeling disconnected as he began to put together his career. But acting classes he began taking three years ago with the teacher Victor Villar-Hauser taught him how to better marry head and heart, and without that renewed commitment, Ben-Adir said he couldn’t have made it through “One Night in Miami.” Directed by Regina King, the film imagines a quartet of Black icons — Malcolm X, Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), Muhammad Ali (Eli Goree) and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) — as they spend one tumultuous night together hashing out their issues.Ben-Adir was the last to be cast in the film after the original actor playing Malcolm dropped out, and had only 14 days to get ready before the shoot began. “It was a complete whirlwind,” he said.These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Why did you have so little time to prep for “One Night in Miami”?After I auditioned, I kept being promised that I was going to find out in a few days, and those few days turned into a couple of weeks. I was really losing faith that the part was going to come to me, and then we got to the 21st of December, and I said to my team, “Guys, we’re shooting on the 3rd of January. This is insane. What’s going on?” I told them, “I’m out, because I’ve been robbed of my preparation time.” That message didn’t get passed on, so when the offer came, it was a real surprise.How different would this role have been if you’d had a year to prepare for it?I would have had an encyclopedic knowledge of Malcolm that I didn’t have going in — I was learning as I was going along. But I don’t necessarily think that’s always helpful, to know too much. There’s something about not knowing and feeling unsure that’s very, very useful to being vulnerable in the moment and just having to trust in everything that’s going on around you. You should be flying into those scenes with your chin out, in full surrender. Ben-Adir on what he hadn’t been prepared for when he left drama school:  “I saw something I had done on television and I felt so depressed by the work. I was like, ‘Is that it? All of the work that went into it, and that’s what it was?’”Credit…Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesIn this case, it probably helped that you knew the other characters well: You’ve auditioned to play Sam Cooke in different projects, and you spent years attached to star in a Muhammad Ali movie for Ang Lee that fell apart.I had a huge understanding of Sam’s history, and I know Muhammad Ali’s story probably better than I do Malcolm’s — that’s how many years I spent working on Muhammad Ali. But without getting too witchy-woo about it, genuinely I feel like it was the accumulation of all the projects and experiences that I’d had up to that point really allowed me to connect with Regina in a way that was equal and collaborative. And what you have in Regina is someone who understood that it needed to be a different Malcolm, a vulnerable Malcolm. A Malcolm we haven’t seen before, a Malcolm in private with his friends.As an actor, you have to call upon that vulnerability a lot, but at the same time, doesn’t this profession require a thick skin?Yeah, absolutely. Last week, I realized that my accountant here has been [screwing] me over for six years, and it was a really big wake-up call, because I realized the business and the creative are linked and you have to be on top of both of them. It’s no good to just be like, I’m an artist. No, you need to get a real handle on the business so that you can be really free within your art. In drama school, no one expressed the importance of being sensible with money and how much impact that has on you creatively.How much impact does it have when you get your hopes up for a big project and it falls through? That Ang Lee film was supposed to be your breakthrough, and then it didn’t happen.I feel like 95 percent of this job is dealing with disappointments and getting your energy up only to be let down. Something fell through last week that I’ve been working on and off for a year, but I made that work about me and my journey as an actor, and I learned something about myself through that process. Yes, it hurt, and you have to cope, but I feel like working with Ang for those two years was a major lesson in how you do not get your hopes up about anything until you’ve wrapped, it’s edited and it’s out.You go, “That door’s closed, another one will open. Show gets canceled, that means you’re available for other stuff.” Lots of people I’ve come up with through the years aren’t able to do that, and you’ll become resentful, bitter, and depressed. I feel real disappointment sometimes, but the bigger the disappointments, the better the highs will be when you get them.If this success had happened when you graduated from drama school, how different would it feel?I don’t think I would have been ready for this when I was 24, I really don’t.For years Ben-Adir was set to play Muhammad Ali for an Ang Lee film, but that project is no longer on.Credit…Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesBut I’m sure that at 24, you felt ready for this, right?More than ready! I was convinced that I should have been walking out of that drama-school building on to playing No. 2 with Brad Pitt. That’s not what happened, but I’m so glad it didn’t, because I know a lot of people who got huge opportunities too early, and they’re not around anymore.The first time I went to L.A., I was scared away and I didn’t go back for four years because I just wasn’t ready. I hadn’t done enough work on the dialect, and I had some really bad experiences with being stopped halfway through auditions because it wasn’t working. I was really lonely — L.A., if you don’t know people, can be really isolating — and I had no money and a terrible manager who ignored me the whole time I was there.So I was like, “Let me just go home.” And then I stayed onstage for a few years and let it happen more naturally. All those small parts where I got to be on set watching Brenda Blethyn, Mark Rylance, Michael Fassbender … you take bits.You’ve said before that part of the reason you came to L.A. in the first place is because your options were limited as a Black actor in the U.K. After the year you’ve had, is that changing at all?Yeah, massively. It’s hard to talk about offers and stuff without it sounding arrogant, but in the last few weeks since the movie’s come out, there’s 16 scripts. It’s really confusing, and it takes you a second. I was like, This is what you dreamed about. This is it.I’m so grateful, man. Yesterday, I had a teaching session at 9 on Zoom, and then I had a singing lesson, four hours of script reading, and two movies that I had to watch. How lucky am I? I really don’t need much. My agents hate me saying it, but I know how to live off $200 a week. I don’t want a big car, although I’d like a garden one day. But I am turned on and excited by the possibilities of my life, which is to be with the people I love, traveling and seeing the world, and then making cool movies.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘One Night in Miami’ Review: After the Big Fight, a War of Words

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storycritic’s pick‘One Night in Miami’ Review: After the Big Fight, a War of WordsA 1964 meeting of Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown is the subject of Regina King’s riveting directorial debut.A moment in time: A scene from Regina King’s “One Night in Miami.” Kingsley Ben-Adir, left, as Malcolm X, taking a photo of Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.).Credit…Patti Perret/Amazon StudiosJan. 14, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETOne Night in MiamiNYT Critic’s PickDirected by Regina KingDramaR1h 54mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.On Feb. 25, 1964, at the Convention Hall in Miami Beach, Fla., Cassius Clay — not yet known as Muhammad Ali — defeated Sonny Liston to become the heavyweight champion of the world. That’s hardly a spoiler, and the fight isn’t the main event in “One Night in Miami,” Regina King’s debut feature as a director. The movie is about what happens after the final bell, when Clay and three men who witnessed the fight gather for a low-key after-party that turns into an impromptu seminar on fame, political action and the obligations of Black celebrities in a time of crisis.The host is Malcolm X, played by Kingsley Ben-Adir less as a confident, charismatic orator than as a smart, anxious man facing a crisis of his own. We’re reminded in a few early scenes of the rift opening up between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad, his mentor and the leader of the Nation of Islam. Frustrated by Muhammad’s autocratic dogmatism and appalled at his sexual predations, Malcolm sees Clay (Eli Goree), who is gravitating toward Islam, as “the ace up my sleeve” — a prominent ally who will help him break away from the Nation.[embedded content]Joining the boxer and the minister in a modest suite at the Hampton House motel are the Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and the singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.). Each is at the peak of his career, and also at something of a crossroads. Brown, increasingly fed up with the ways Black athletes are exploited and commodified, has his eye on Hollywood. Cooke’s most recent effort to attract a white audience — a gig at the Copacabana in New York — was met with a chilly reception.Malcolm tries to push Cooke in another direction, arguing that the job of successful Black artists isn’t to court white approval but to use their fame and talent to advance the cause of their own people. The dramatic nerve center of the film, adapted by Kemp Powers from his own play, is the quarrel between Malcolm and Cooke, who have known each other for a long time and whose intimacy is laced with rivalry and resentment. It’s a complex and subtle debate that implicates Clay and Brown, and that reverberates forward in history and the later actions of all four.Cooke, who drives a red sports car, smokes cigarettes and carries a flask in his jacket, stands in obvious temperamental contrast to Malcolm, who is both the straight arrow and the nerd of the group, offering them vanilla ice cream and showing off his new Rolleiflex camera. Among the pleasures of “One Night in Miami” is how it allows us to imagine we’re glimpsing the private selves of highly public figures, exploring aspects of their personalities that their familiar personas were partly constructed to obscure.This is also, I think, an important argument of Powers’s script: History isn’t made by icons, but by human beings. Fame, which provides each of them with opportunities and temptations, comes with a cost. The fine print of racism is always part of the contract. What Cooke, Brown and Clay share is a desire for freedom — a determination to find independence from the businesses and institutions that seek to control them and profit from their talents.Malcolm, who faces different constraints, urges them to connect their own freedom with something larger, an imperative that each of the others, in his own way, acknowledges. Malcolm’s manner can be didactic, but “One Night in Miami” is anything but. Instead of a group biopic or a ready-made costume drama, it’s an intellectual thriller, crackling with the energy of ideas and emotions as they happen. Who wouldn’t want to be in that room? And there we are.What we witness may not be exactly what happened. I don’t know if Malcolm X really traveled with a copy of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” in his luggage so that he could make a point about protest music by dropping the needle on “Blowin’ in the Wind.” There are aspects of the characters’ lives that are noted in passing but not really explored — notably Cooke’s and Brown’s treatment of women. Malcolm’s wife, Betty Shabazz (Joaquina Kalukango), appears in a few scenes, as does Barbara Cooke (Nicolette Robinson), but they are marginal to a story that is preoccupied with manhood. Still, there is enough authenticity and coherence in the writing and the performances to make the film a credible representation of its moment, and King’s direction makes it more than that.An actress of singular poise and intensity — see “Watchmen,” “If Beale Street Could Talk” and, going back a little further, “Poetic Justice” — she demonstrates those traits behind the camera as well. There are a few boxing and musical scenes, but most of the action in “One Night in Miami” is talk. King’s attention to it as nimble and unpredictable as the dialogue itself, and creates an atmosphere of restlessness and spontaneity, that nervous, exhilarating feeling that this night could go anywhere.Clay, the youngest of the four, is the one who most vividly embodies that sense of possibility. Goree captures the familiar rasp and melody of the voice, and also the champion’s wit and exuberance. There haven’t been many people who could match his giddy, unapologetic delight in being himself, and Clay can look a bit callow next to Cooke and Brown, who have logged more years and paid more dues in the world of celebrity. But Goree shows that Clay, as playful as he could be, was also serious and brave, qualities that would come to the fore a few years later when he risked his career and his freedom to oppose the Vietnam War.The seeds of that action and others, this movie suggests, were planted that night. The shadows of a complicated, tragic future hover over the motel furniture. Within a year of that night, Sam Cooke and Malcolm X would both be killed, one in a Los Angeles motel, the other in a Harlem ballroom. (Only Malcolm’s death is mentioned in the film). The later chapters in Muhammad Ali’s life, and in Brown’s, are part of the crazy, contentious record of our time.And “One Night in Miami,” at first glance, might be taken as a minor anecdote plucked from that larger narrative. It doesn’t make grand statements about race, politics, sports or music. It’s just a bunch of guys talking — bantering, blustering, dropping their defenses and opening their hearts. But the substance of their talk is fascinating, and their arguments echo powerfully in the present. This is one of the most exciting movies I’ve seen in quite some time.One Night in Miami.Rated R. Smoking and Swearing. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. Watch on Amazon.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More