Passing the torch
Malachi Kirby, LeVar Burton on becoming Kunta
NEW YORK LeVar Burton was only a sophomore at the University of Southern California when he was cast as Roots’ enslaved hero Kunta Kinte. Arriving on the series’ Savannah, Ga., set in spring 1976, he remembers feeling both overwhelmed and humbled.
“My first day as a professional actor, Cicely Tyson played my mother and Maya Angelou played my grandmother,” says Burton, 59. “I was surrounded by idols of mine that I had admired my whole life, and they were excited. It was impossible not to feel like you were part of something remarkable, but no one had any inkling that it would create the cultural tsunami that it did.”
When Roots aired over eight consecutive nights on ABC in January 1977, it became nothing short of a phenomenon: averaging 80 million viewers per episode and more than 100 million for its final installment. The series was nominated for 37 Emmy Awards (winning nine), and was a launching pad for Burton, who went on to play Lt. Cmdr. Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next
Generation and host PBS’ Reading Rainbow.
Now, he passes down the titular Kunta to Malachi Kirby, star of History’s four-night Roots remake (Monday, 9 ET/PT). Having only appeared previously in British series such as East Enders and
Doctor Who, the 26-year-old unknown was cast from a pool of more than 3,500 actors last year.
Executive producer Mark Wolper says it was Kirby’s intensity that made him an ideal fit for Kunta, a West African warrior who is captured and sold into slavery in the 18th century United States. “The reason why LeVar Burton worked in the first Roots was because you could see this guy’s soul,” Wolper says. “It’s the same thing with Malachi. You could see his soul and see that he was a powerful warrior.”
The key for Kirby was to not try and re-create Burton’s performance — a realization he came to at the first table read with the cast. “I was in a room filled with people who brought these charac- ters to life,” Kirby says. “That was the first time I looked in the mirror and was like, ‘Why am I here?’ I didn’t feel like I was good enough. I prayed and came to God about it, and what came to me was: This was never about me. I’m a vessel. Get out of the way and just let this story be told.”
The remake, also airing on A&E and Lifetime, was shot between South Africa and Louisiana last summer. It draws from both the original miniseries and the 1976 Alex Haley novel on which it’s based. One of the most taxing scenes for Kirby was an early one, in which Kunta is repeatedly whipped until he says his slave name, Toby — a brutal moment from the first Roots that Burton says took him a week to mentally prepare for. Kirby was similarly overcome with emotion filming it as Kunta has his identity literally beat out of him.
“That took me to a place psychologically that I wasn’t prepared for,” Kirby says. “I was never touched with the whip, but I may as well have been for whatever was going on with me. The pain I was responding to was far worse.”