Catch a Fire: Kingsley Ben-Adir Finds His Light in Bob Marley: One Love

You’d be forgiven for not quite knowing where you’ve seen Kingsley Ben-Adir before. He was, for years, a steady presence on the London stage, doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Regent’s Park, Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic, and new dramas including Gillian Slovo’s The Riots at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn and Arinze Kene’s God’s Property at the Soho Theatre. But his work in television and film has been quieter, characterized by mostly supporting parts in projects like Peaky Blinders, The OA, High Fidelity, and, last year, Marvel’s Secret Invasion and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. (It was little more than instinct that pulled him away from the theater; in 2014, against his then agent’s advice, Ben-Adir declined an offer to make his West End debut in Shakespeare in Love, determined, he says, that he should “get some camera experience.”)

Yet it feels strange to call the 37-year-old a character actor—not only because of his marquee-​idol good looks and reedy six-foot-two frame, but also because, over the past few years, Ben-Adir has developed a knack for playing Great Men. In 2020, shortly after appearing as Barack Obama in Showtime’s The Comey Rule, he popped up again as Malcolm X in Regina King’s One Night in Miami…, a part that won him the Gotham Award for breakthrough actor. (“I was like, ‘I didn’t know you could get nominated for breakthrough work at 34,’ ” he joked at the time.)

Ben-Adir continues the theme this winter with Bob Marley: One Love, starring as the iconic Jamaican reggae singer, songwriter, and Rastafarian opposite Lashana Lynch as Marley’s wife, Rita. Narrowing its focus to an especially turbulent chapter in his life, the film captures Marley’s near assassination in Kingston in 1976; his subsequent flight to Europe, where he recorded and toured Exodus, his ninth studio album, in 1977; and then his triumphant return to Jamaica for the One Love Peace Concert in April 1978—an event attended by over 30,000 people. (A few years later, in 1981, Marley would die from melanoma at 36.) King Richard’s Reinaldo Marcus Green directs, with Rita and two of her children, Ziggy and Cedella, aboard as producers.

The part was so plum—and seemed so absolutely wrong for him—that at first, Ben-Adir thought going up for it would be a waste of time. “Years ago you’d get sent an audition and you’d start going, There’s no point in me taping for this, because Leonardo DiCaprio is going to play it,” he says. “You can start smelling the sense of, This is kind of too good.” And, anyway, Ben-Adir couldn’t really sing, he couldn’t really dance, he definitely couldn’t play the guitar, and he’d recently bulked up to 215 pounds for Secret Invasion. “I’m like, Anything I do is just going to put them off.”

But the stakes changed when he saw an early version of King Richard, and understood that the Marley family would be watching his tape right away. “So then there’s a kind of pressure to it,” he says, flashing a sly smile. “There’s a bit of danger. So I thought, What’s the harm?”

It’s always been about a feeling for Ben-Adir. Also, often, tears.

We are at the Manhattan offices of Paramount Pictures, in a comfortable (if oddly oblong) room behind the studio’s private theater. Dressed in a marled blue quarter-zip sweater and tan joggers, a tiny gold hoop winking discreetly from one ear, he is vividly describing his teenage years in northwest London, as the late 1990s turned into the early aughts, when he was beginning to fall in love with performance.

“There were certain films and TV shows that kept making me cry,” he says. Once, for, “like, a friend’s friend’s birthday,” Ben-Adir was dragged along to see In America, Jim Sheridan’s 2002 drama about a poor Irish family making a go of it in New York City. Quite to his surprise, “I just remember Djimon [Hounsou]—being transfixed with his relationship with the small girl—and then Paddy Considine, at the end when he’s saying goodbye to Frankie…I could not stop crying.”

He’d experienced something similar with Good Will Hunting (“It moved me”), and then, at about 16, when he was asked to prepare a scene from A Raisin in the Sun at his secondary school. “I just randomly got thrown into a drama class at that age because of being not academic,” he explains. “A lot of kids who were on the edge of being expelled got thrown into drama.” Well, whatever was meant to happen to him there, did: “I remember reading one of the speeches—I can’t remember what it is, it was so long ago—and choking up.” Ben-Adir would eventually enroll at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama—which counts Daniel Craig, Orlando Bloom, Damian Lewis, and Michaela Coel among its alumni—graduating in 2011.

In Ziggy’s telling, it was also “just a feeling” that compelled his family to throw their weight behind a narrative film about Bob Marley. (Ziggy had previously served as an executive producer on Marley, the acclaimed 2012 documentary by Kevin Macdonald, in which he, Rita, and Cedella had also all participated.) “We took a step to try and get it done,” he says. “But the funny thing is, for us, everything works out the way it should work out. We live with that spiritual kind of rule.”

If one can submit to serendipity while also maintaining vertiginous standards, then that’s the sensibility that governed the project more broadly: The Marleys—and Paramount—took as much time as they needed to get One Love exactly right. (This June will mark six years since the film was announced.) An important first step was finding their director. Green was still editing King Richard—the biographical sports drama about Richard, Venus, and Serena Williams that would win Will Smith an Oscar in 2022—when he was approached. Yet upon meeting, he and Ziggy mostly discussed Stone Cars, a 14-minute short Green had made on a shoestring budget in South Africa years earlier. “The fact that that was what pulled him in made me realize, Oh, he wants something real,” Green says.

Green was hired in March 2021, and by February 2022 the movie had its Bob. “I didn’t know who Kingsley Ben-Adir was. I really didn’t,” Green says. “I’d heard the name, and maybe I saw him in something and didn’t realize I saw him.” But reviewing his tape, “I was like, Whoa, who’s this guy? He really had incredible presence, and he did a lot in the pauses—a lot in the silence.” What he showed them, Ziggy says, was more dropped-in, more emotional, “than just a surface interpretation of Bob Marley.” In the film, Ben-Adir’s Marley is endlessly kinetic—bouncing on the balls of his feet as he sings and strums—but also interior, attempting to reconcile the conflicting demands of his family, his faith, and a career that was taking him further and further from home.

Continues Green, “I knew that I was never going to find Bob Marley. I was never going to find somebody with his exact voice and exact look.” But Ben-Adir had the foundation—and, after reassuring conversations with Rami Malek and Austin Butler, both of whom had lately taken on ambitious musical biopics of their own (Bohemian Rhapsody for Malek, Elvis for Butler), Green felt confident that prep (and hair and makeup) would get his star the rest of the way.

Lynch, known for her exciting recent turns in No Time to Die, The Woman King, Matilda the Musical, and The Marvels, joined the cast as Rita not long thereafter—and without a moment’s hesitation. Both of Lynch’s parents had moved to England from Kingston, so for her, the movie was personal. “When I spoke to my agent about the project, I thought, All of my life steps, all of my career steps, have amounted to this moment,” she tells me. We’re seated in the vaguely tropical-themed café at the back of Pier59 Studios in Chelsea, and despite her jet lag—Lynch had flown in from London just for the day—her eyes are bright, her skin glowing. “Even if I was playing a palm tree in the background,” she adds, “I would need to be connected to this movie.” Before she’d actually taped, Lynch met with Green “and I basically threatened him and said, ‘You need to get it right, even if I’m not part of it. My whole country will come for you.’ ” But after a chemistry read with Ben-Adir, the part was hers.

The preparation started instantly, and went on for about five months. Ben-Adir slimmed back down. He listened to Marley’s albums over and over again, and learned to play the guitar. He has Caribbean roots—his maternal grandparents, with whom he was very close, were immigrants from Trinidad and Tobago (“Trini to the bone,” as he puts it), and he was brought along to Notting Hill Carnival from infancy—but learning Jamaican patois was a whole ordeal. With the help of a seven-person dialect team from Jamaica, specialists from America, and his own pure grit—over several months, he painstakingly transcribed phonetically some 50 archival interviews of Marley’s—Ben-Adir finally reached a point of something close to fluency. “It’s the most complicated acting task I’ve ever faced,” he says. Yet by the time he started shooting, he could understand “everything Bob was saying. So his emotional point of view, his spiritual point of view, all of the complexity of the patois that he speaks in—I knew what he meant.”

While Ben-Adir resists the idea that, as its leading man, he approached One Love differently than he would another project—“I feel like I put the same amount of pressure on everything that I do,” he says. “I don’t want to just turn up. I find that quite depressing”—playing Bob Marley certainly gave him more to juggle. But he had firm supports in place, the Marley family chief among them. “I spent a lot of time talking to them about acting. Because they’re all musical, they speak the language of story and meaning and journey and feeling,” he says. They were also very present on set, along with the late Neville Garrick, Marley’s longtime friend and art director. “It was nerve-racking,” Ben-Adir says, “but after a while, seeing them behind the camera became this beautiful thing, because I could trust that if anything was off or didn’t feel right, Jamaicans, they’re going to say something.” He laughs. “They’ll tell you straight.”

Lynch was another important resource. “Days when Lashana was there were always the best days,” he says. Quickly and wordlessly, she became a sort of guardian—checking if he’d eaten, if he’d slept, if he needed water—rather as Rita had been for Marley, Lynch imagines. “I feel like I immediately stepped into Rita when I saw Kingsley’s need on set,” she says. “Truly, I would grab him by the shoulders and be like, ‘If you don’t rest today, I’m slapping you.’ ” Yet she also admired how completely he’d steeped himself in the work. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen or worked with someone so committed,” she says. “It forced the cast, the supporting artists, the heads of department, everyone to be on their A-game.”

A highlight of the four-month shoot, for everyone involved, was spending time in Trench Town, the part of Kingston memorialized by Marley in songs like “No Woman, No Cry,” “Natty Dread,” and “Trenchtown Rock.” For one thing, there was the chance to engage with and give back to the community there, which remains among the poorest in Jamaica. “Helping locals profit from the making of this movie, in a way that is going to be substantial and have a long-term effect—it’s an experience that people in those types of neighborhoods hardly get,” says Ziggy. “It was such a special thing, and that’s one thing I think my father would’ve been very proud of.”

And Ben-Adir was thrilled to feel so welcome there. “You’d spend all day doing a scene, and then you come back and you’re talking to all the locals and the neighbors, and then you end up chilling on someone’s porch, talking to them for half an hour,” he says. He’d been prepared for a level of scrutiny, a touch of suspicion, from the people for whom Bob Marley remains a national hero, even more than 40 years after his death. But what he encountered was just the opposite. “I think they saw the intensity that I was working at, and I think the Jamaicans kind of respected it,” Ben-Adir says. “They were like, This English boy crazy.”

It was a strange thing, when One Love finally wrapped last April. “I enjoyed the responsibility—it really makes you feel alive,” Ben-Adir reflects. “And then afterwards you feel, Oh, everything’s just slow.” But he can do slow too—in fact, his body gave him little choice. After flying from Jamaica to New York, where he spent a week going to jazz clubs, seeing comedy sets, and just wandering around with friends, Ben-Adir was zapped. “My immune system crashed. I was in bed for four days in sweats,” he remembers. “The adrenaline just disappeared.”

Between jobs, at home in east London, he keeps a very low profile. He does housework, reads scripts, and listens to podcasts (about soccer, mostly—Ben-Adir supports Arsenal—though he also name-checks Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO). No social media for him; he’s too discreet even to share his wife’s name, though I understand that they are recently married and don’t have children. Instead, he chatters happily about his love of long walks and cold swims. “It’s also how I socialize with my pals: We all meet at the same place and swim and sauna and then catch up,” he says. “When we were young, we used to go out and drink and get trashed, but now we have more healthy stuff. We meet to swim and have black coffee and then go home.”

When we speak, Ben-Adir still seems to be processing the One Love whirlwind. One senses he hasn’t quite come down from the high. “It’s powerful. And privilege doesn’t sum it up, or honor doesn’t sum it up—it’s like you’ve been let into this really special, unique legacy, and you’ve got to share in the private intimacy of one of the great musicians of all time and his family. I mean, Jesus Christ.” He erupts into self-conscious laughter. “Now I’ve said it like that, it’s kind of stressful.”

 In this story: hair, Nai’vasha; makeup, Jessica Smalls.