An Outsider Becomes Bob Marley
Bob Marley, the 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 18 centimeters taller than Mr. Marley did. Still, Mr. BenAdir was cast as Mr. 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 and a producer on “Bob Marley: One Love.” But he decided such things were not the key to portraying his father: “Kingsley brought an emotional depth that nobody else brought to the auditions,” he said.
The choice has been denounced by many Jamaicans, who point out that since 1990s films like “Cool Runnings,” Hollywood has been using non-Jamaican actors with diluted accents.
But while reviews for “Bob Marley: One Love” have been almost uniformly negative, even some harsh critics have praised Mr. 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, Mr. Ben-Adir explained his transformation.
“On the audition tape, I knew that my Jamaican patois was going to be basic and wrong,” said Mr. Ben-Adir, 37. He had only two days to prep. He crammed by studying “Live at the Rainbow,” a concert video shot in 1977.
After seeing his audition, the Marley family asked to meet Mr. Ben-Adir, who said, “There was something about the family being involved where I felt like I could let go of the responsibility of the whole thing and focus on finding the emotional truth.”
He had less than a year to transform himself. He bought a guitar, watched YouTube instructional videos, and played “Redemption Song” over and over “like a lunatic” before hiring a guitar teacher. Producers said they could shoot around it, but Mr. Ben-Adir felt it was crucial to learn.
Singing was a steeper challenge. Mr. Ben-Adir does not even like karaoke. In the movie’s concert scenes, he lip syncs to the original recording, but elsewhere, he plays guitar and sings. He thought Mr. Marley’s sons Stephen, who served as music supervisor, and Ziggy would dub his vocals, but thanks to work with a voice coach, Fiora Cutler, he sounded good enough to handle the job himself. “I can hold a tune,” he said proudly.
“I realized that I’d never look as close to him as I want, so I had to let it go,” Mr. Ben-Adir said. Nine months was not enough time to grow dreadlocks, so he wore a wig.
In his research, Mr. Ben-Adir observed that Mr. Marley was adept at code-switching, varying his tone and vocabulary depending on the situation. “If Bob didn’t like you,” he said, his patois would “get so heavy, you can’t understand what he is saying.”
During downtime on the “Barbie” shoot (he was one of the Kens), he studied Mr. Marley’s accent. Once filming started, he leaned on the Marley family and Neville Garrick, Mr. Marley’s close friend, who is credited as the film’s historical adviser, to settle into the right level of patois. He also studied Mr. Marley’s manner of moving onstage, which he described as a way of conducting the band, as well as other physical tics.
Mr. Ben-Adir spoke to “60 or 70 people who knew Bob,” he said. Some of those closest to Mr. Marley refused to meet him. “Not everyone is going to trust me, because I’m ‘an English bwoy,’ ” he said in patois. “I get it. Bob means so much to so many people, and they still have a lot of pain that he died so young.” (The star died of cancer at age 36, in 1981.)
The movie begins in 1976, when Mr. Marley is already the biggest star in reggae. He survives a possibly politically motivated murder attempt at his home, then goes into exile in Britain, where he records “Exodus,” the album that makes him a global superstar.
“I understood that the internal journey of Bob had to be about safety,” Mr. Ben-Adir said. “The film is an exploration of trauma, and what it means to feel like you’re not safe or not loved in your own country.”
Mr. Ben-Adir, who talks little about his personal life, said he found common ground with Mr. Marley there.
“There are a lot of things my friends don’t even know,” he said. “From as far back as I can remember. I didn’t have a sense that it’s all going to be OK.”
He explained, “The witnessing of violence at a certain age, and how that affects trust and safety — that was really what my investigation with Bob and myself was. It was violence.”