JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH
The Black Panthers have had their legacy manipulated for decades. A bracing biopic with a twist is about to set things straight
The inside story of the Daniel Kaluuya-starring Black Panthers drama that might just win all kinds of Oscars.
THE 1960S WAS a seismic decade for the lives and deaths of Black Civil Rights activists. You know about Martin Luther King Jr, the man behind one of the most famous speeches in American history. Elements of his story have been told on screen 13 times. You know about Malcolm X. Denzel Washington has played the icon twice, and he has been immortalised on screen on 11 other occasions. And then there’s Fred Hampton. The leader of the Black Panther party’s Illinois chapter and the mastermind behind the Rainbow coalition, which united political organisations to work towards social change. He’s never been the focus of a film. The history books at schools have no mention of him. “Sixty to 70 per cent of the articles that appeared in the press in the ’60s and ’70s about the Panthers were literally composed by the FBI,” says Judas And The Black Messiah director Shaka King. “So the history has been put forth by the people who crushed them and assassinated them and imprisoned so many of them.” Many people
who know of Hampton are more aware of how he died rather than how he lived.
But times are changing. Last year, Kelvin Harrison Jr briefly played Hampton in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial Of The Chicago 7. And now, with Judas And The Black Messiah, the former Black Panther leader will finally get his due. “It’s just tough to make movies about people of colour and our history,” says Lakeith Stanfield, who plays the film’s co-lead, William O’neal. “But it’s getting easier. And I’m glad to be a part of helping to usher in Black storytelling.”
It’s an ambitious second project for King, who has been working on it for four years. But what makes the film even more enthralling is that it’s not just a Hampton biopic. In also telling the story of O’neal, a petty criminal turned FBI informant who infiltrated the Black Panther party and played a key role in Hampton’s assassination, it becomes more than mere biopic. “We decided to make it a two-hander and essentially Trojan-horsed a Hampton biopic in a crime drama in an undercover movie,” explains King. If you want to tell Fred Hampton’s story right, it seems, you have to pull out all the stops. And in this case, that meant making three movies in one.
Fred Hampton was one of the most significant voices of the Civil Rights movement, but back then you might not have known it: The Black Panthers were villainised by the government and made out to be a militant threat. For King, the opportunity to enlighten audiences was a big motivator. “It’s important that people know the lies that this country’s put forth about the Panthers and their politics, and about this country’s history of repressing progression often through violent means,” he says.
With the film focusing on both Hampton and O’neal, a fuller
picture emerges. Through Hampton, we get an up-close look at the revolutionary work of the Panthers. And after getting caught impersonating an FBI officer, O’neal’s subsequent recruitment gives us a behind-the-scenes view of the government’s racially motivated machinations. The trust that forms between the two men as O’neal rises up the ranks of the Party only adds to the tension.
Having known nothing about O’neal’s story, producer Ryan Coogler was blown away by the unique set-up. The Black Panther director had become fast friends with King when they met at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013, where they had both premiered their feature directorial debuts. Once the screenplay for Black Messiah was complete, King gave Coogler a call, and an offer to produce. In turn, Coogler pitched the film to Charles D. King [founder of MACRO Films] who helped find the film a home at Warner Bros., and questions turned to casting.
For Hampton, they needed an actor capable of filling his notinconsiderable shoes. Hampton was a charismatic leader and a gifted orator, and watching footage of him, it’s easy to see why so many flocked to his cause. “In all the different things I read about Hampton, they always talked about how mature he was,” says King. “They said he was very, very mature and thoughtful in addition to being witty and radical in this very youthful way.” But who to embody all those qualities? Ironically enough, the answer was to cast one of the stars of Black Panther. When Coogler asked who would be a good fit for Hampton, King was ready with his answer. “With Daniel Kaluuya, there’s a level of gravitas and maturity to him that you don’t really see in someone that young,” he says now [Hampton was leader of the Illinois chapter at 20]. “He has a youthful charisma and he has this old soul, which is a very powerful combination. The first time we met, that came through very clearly to me. And I was like, there’s no-one else.”
From Get Out to Queen & Slim and more, Kaluuya has put in amazing performances in excellent movies that always feel of the
moment. Black Messiah’s Hampton is no different, and he went the extra mile. In addition to beefing up so as to more resemble Hampton, he took on Hampton’s distinctive accent for the movie, and remained in it even when he wasn’t shooting.
King wasn’t the only one that had to sign off on Kaluuya; he also had to get the greenlight from Hampton’s son, Fred Hampton Jr — now the President and Chairman of the Black Panther Party Cubs — who was on set almost every day to ensure the production was getting the details right. And while any biopic has an element of narrative licence, he proved to be an invaluable resource.
One particularly pivotal development late on in the screenplay saw Hampton kick O’neal out of the party when he proposes that they blow up City Hall, only for him to cry his way back in later. Hampton Jr pointed out that that would have effectively made Hampton complicit in his own demise, and the movie’s final act was changed for the better. “If we’d kept that in, I think people would’ve rightfully gotten very angry at us,” says King. “There are so many missteps and mistakes we would have made had it not been for Hampton Jr. It was a real push and pull of getting the truth of the history and the narrative Hollywood filmmaking of it all.”
Nowhere was that balance tricky to straddle than with the Judas of the story. If Hampton is the film’s heart and soul, “then the entertaining genre part that’s gonna get people who don’t know anything about Hampton to see this movie? That’s the O’neal part,” says King. In infiltrating the Black Panther party, O’neal has to hide many of his true emotions in public, but he’s not always suffering in private. As he gets better and better at conning and manipulating the Panthers, moments of pride and enjoyment become just as present as the moments of guilt.
It’s a magnificently complex character study and the darkest material of Stanfield’s career. Understandably, a character who is both villain and victim was not an easy one for the actor to immediately get to grips with: “It wasn’t until I hit the ground running that I realised just how deep it’d go. He’s not just a snitch. He’s a human,” he says. King had worked with Stanfield on 2018’s Lazercism, a five-minute short on racial glaucoma. Although that shoot only took four hours, the director — who had been a fan of Stanfield since he debuted in 2013 drama Short Term 12 — was always certain the actor could pull off the tricky role. “The movie works best if you’re hoping that O’neal changes,” says King. “There’s just something about Lakeith that can be very sympathetic.” One harrowing scene that sees O’neal make a morally destructive decision was especially affecting for Stanfield, who drew on personal experiences to help inform his performance. “I had a great friend who I grew up with that was killed by his brother, so I was thinking about that and thinking about how we sometimes destroy ourselves,” he says. “The complexities of the character definitely stood out to me. I realised it was an opportunity to explore them within myself.”
Such soul-mining speaks not only to the power of these moments, but the power of Hampton, O’neal, and many others’ stories. More than 50 years after these events took place, their relevance continues to grow.
When the film wrapped in December 2019, there was no way King could have foreseen the year that would follow it. 2020 has been particularly taxing for people of the Black diaspora: in addition to a pandemic that has killed off Black and brown people — many of whom don’t have access to good healthcare in the US — at a disproportionate rate, and shocking police brutality that has brought about a worldwide reckoning on racial injustice, real life has paralleled art in a big way.
King is quick to point out that these are “evergreen” issues, though there was a time when he was hopeful things would be different. “It might sound crazy, but I was almost optimistic that the movie would kind of be behind the curve”, he says. “But obviously that’s not the case. The movie’s really right on time in a lot of ways.”
Its proximity to real-world events means that plenty of lessons in Black Messiah are apt today. One which King is keen to re-emphasise is for people to be more proactive and understand the dangers of being apolitical. A decisive, pre-title drop scene sees O’neal offered a choice: do the time for his crime, or inform on his fellow brothers to the FBI. In not taking a side, he found himself on the wrong one. “In the beginning when he’s asked, ‘How do you feel about Malcolm X?’, he said he didn’t know,” says King. “And he answered honestly. And the reaction of the FBI agent is to kind of smile and think, ‘Oh, I can use this guy.’” Stanfield stresses the point. “I hope that people realise that you can make a distinction in a decision between political matters and where you find yourself and where you stand in the world in general.”
But above all, Judas And The Black Messiah exists as a testament to Fred Hampton and the Illinois Panthers. Because of the lies and propaganda that had been spread about their politics, their legacy had been brushed aside when it should have been amplified. King’s film is a big step in the right direction. “A lot of people don’t know about Fred Hampton,” says Stanfield. “A lot of people don’t know about his legacy. More will now.” Judas And The Black Messiah makes sure of that. JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH IS DUE IN CINEMAS FROM 26 FEBRUARY