THE X FACTOR

HIS PORTRAYAL OF MALCOLM X IN ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI HAS JUST GARNERED KINGSLEY BEN-ADIR AN EE RISING STAR AWARD NOMINATION AND NOW THE SCRIPTS ARE POURING IN. BUT, AS ANNA BONET LEARNS, THE PATH TO SUCCESS HASN’T ALWAYS BEEN SMOOTH

Actor Kingsley Ben-adir has reached a watershed moment in his career, but is yet to come to terms with it. ‘I still haven’t got my head around the idea that anything I say could be thought of as interesting to anyone,’ he declares on our Zoom call. I can’t help but laugh in response. This is coming from the actor who is fast becoming one of Hollywood’s most sought-after Brits; it’s probably time he started getting used to it. In the last 18 months alone, the 35-year-old from north-west London has played two American icons: Malcolm X in Regina King’s Oscar-tipped film One Night In Miami and Barack Obama in the miniseries The Comey Rule. He’s starred opposite Zoë Kravitz in Hulu’s High Fidelity and Anna Kendrick both in the HBO series Love Life and festive film Noelle.

He’s no stranger to UK screens either, having had roles as pathologist Marcus Summer in ITV’S detective drama Vera, and as Colonel Ben Younger in BBC One’s Peaky Blinders.

And right now, Ben-adir’s hard work seems to be paying off. He’s been nominated for the EE Rising Star Award at this year’s EE BAFTA Film Awards (previous winners include John Boyega, Letitia Wright and Tom Hardy), and his quite frankly outstanding performance as Malcolm X has also seen him swept up in the Oscars buzz. ‘It feels a little surreal,’ he says of it all. ‘And you know, flattering, but not in a way where I feel like…’ he pauses, and fiddles with his cap. ‘It’s a weird feeling.’

He does this a lot throughout our chat. Long pauses punctuate his sentences, many of which trail off into nothingness. Sometimes, they end with a smile and a simple: ‘I don’t know!’ But rather than trying to be careful about what he says, Ben-adir is simply still figuring out how to navigate his new life in the limelight.

He’s speaking to me from his flat in Kentish Town, wearing a black hoodie and NY cap, and aptly enough, this is also where his story begins. Raised in the area by his mother, a carer, his interest in acting started young; he describes watching Jim Sheridan’s 2002 film In America as a teen and ‘bawling my eyes out’. But there was never a grand plan. After leaving school at 16, he started working with children with special educational needs and behavioural problems. That was, until fate intervened.

One of the parents he met while in the job happened to be an actor at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Ben-adir realised that this could lead to an opportunity to pursue his passion. Several conversations and a few introductions later, he won a place at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, aged 22. He’s not ashamed to say, however, that he didn’t find drama school easy. ‘I really struggled,’ he admits. ‘I failed every year and they made me audition again to get back in.’

Still, he pushed on, and after graduating in 2011, found himself an agent and a handful of theatre roles. In 2013, he was cast in Mark Rylance’s production of Much Ado About Nothing.

For someone who had struggled through drama school, it sounds like quite the success story, but Ben-adir assures me this wasn’t the case. ‘The rejections stacked up,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘I never had jobs lined up. Getting a call that I had a part was always a huge relief.’

Less than a decade on, however, Ben-adir seems to be in the driving seat. When sent the script for One Night In Miami in 2019, to read for the role of Cassius Clay (who changed his name to Muhammad Ali after joining the Nation of Islam), he turned it down. What gave him the confidence to say no? He takes a sip of coffee. ‘It was f ***** g hard,’ he concedes. ‘But once you’ve had enough experiences of situations where your heart tells you it’s not right, and you don’t listen, then you have a sh*t experience – you have to start trusting your instinct.’

‘GETTING A CALL TO SAY I HAD A PART WAS A HUGE RELIEF’

Set in 1964, the film portrays a fictionalised meeting of four Black icons: boxer Clay, American footballer Jim Brown, soul musician Sam Cooke and civil rights activist Malcolm X, who later was assassinated. The role of 22-year-old Clay felt ‘too young; too jovial’, Ben-adir explains. Instead, he was drawn to the vulnerability of Malcolm X’s character, and told the producers that if it became available, he was in. Two weeks before filming commenced, the actor who had been cast dropped out and Ben-adir got the call.

What followed, Ben-adir says, was a gruelling fortnight in which he had to lose 20 pounds, learn the script from back to front and gain an encyclopaedic knowledge of his character. On top of that, in stepping into Malcolm X’s shoes, he was following in the footsteps of the likes of Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman, who had both played him in the past. ‘It was a hell of a lot of pressure,’ Ben-adir says. ‘But I go into every role with a healthy amount of terror.’ Plus, there was something exciting about joining that hall of fame. ‘I’m no fool; that was a serious opportunity,’ he grins.

At its heart, One Night In Miami is about racism and the role that each of us plays in striving for social justice. When filming at the beginning of last year, the cast and crew had no idea that by the time it was released, global Black Lives Matter marches would have been among the pivotal moments of 2020. ‘Strike with the weapon you have,’ Ben-adir’s character instructs Cooke, ‘your voice.’ When I ask him whether this line resonates with him personally, he gazes away, deep in thought. After a while, he nods slowly, and admits that his place in the conversation is something he’s been thinking about a lot recently – particularly as someone who isn’t on social media. ‘I think for me, my political act is throwing everything into the work I do; putting my energy into the roles I believe in and saying no to the ones that don’t have a positive message,’ he says. ‘I feel like I should be doing that, rather than opening up a Twitter account and screaming on there every day.’ He laughs. ‘But ask me this again next year and maybe I’ll have changed my mind.’

Ben-adir says that working on the project was ‘just incredible’ and that he came out of the experience ‘thinking that there’s no going back’. But, it wasn’t so long ago that he considered giving up acting altogether. At the time, he’d just finished filming the second season of Netflix’s sci-fi mystery The OA (he played a private detective), as well as the 2019 Christmas film Noelle, in which his main storyline got cut in the edit.

‘I was in serious doubt,’ he confesses now. ‘I saw a few things I’d been in, and I just felt really disappointed,’ he shakes his head. ‘I would watch them back and go, “Is that it?” I felt lost. Like I’d hit a brick wall.’ Determined to work through it, he decided to ‘reinvest’ in himself and started acting training again with a teacher in Los Angeles. ‘Then I jumped into High Fidelity with Zoë and had the most fulfilling acting experience,’ he smiles.

Does he feel like he’s reaping the rewards now, then? ‘I do feel like I’ve reached a turning point,’ he says. ‘I’ve read more scripts over the past four weeks than I’ve read probably in the last three years!’ I’m curious as to what he’s looking for when he’s reading scripts now. What’s his next big ambition? ‘The ambition was always to get into this position, where you have material coming in,’ he says. ‘As a jobbing actor, you don’t get to read that many scripts. I remember seeing films coming out at festivals and wondering, “where do these come from? How do I get access to these movies?” And that’s happening now. This is the bit that I’ve been looking forward to. So it feels silly to wish this away and worry too much about what’s next.’

His upmost desire though, he says, is to stay ‘as anonymous as possible’ whatever success comes his way. ‘I want to be able to disappear into roles. And I like my life in Kentish Town,’ he muses. He speaks fondly of the same friendship group he’s had ‘since Year Seven at school’ and of spending time with his fiancée, who he tries to keep as private as possible ‘to protect her’.

While he won’t be drawn on the finer details of their relationship, I’m interested to know more about Ben-adir’s views on love, given it’s a topic that’s put under the microscope in one of his recent shows, Amazon Prime’s Soulmates. The clever anthology series is set in a futuristic world where you can take a test to identify your ideal romantic partner. Ben-adir stars as Franklin, who has met his wife the old-fashioned way, but whose marriage begins to break down when the idea of taking the ‘test’ triggers doubt in their relationship.

So is love a destiny or a choice? ‘I think it is a choice,’ he decides, after a long pause. ‘But I think love, because of the strength of the feeling – how powerful and overwhelming it can feel – can sometimes feel like it’s not a choice.’ Plus, he says, he did meet his fiancée in a coffee shop. ‘No mutual friends, no connections, no one introducing us,’ he smiles. ‘So it does feel a bit like… the randomness of it, you know?’ Sounds like destiny to me, I say. He shoots back a grin.

As we wrap things up and I wish him luck with the awards, he gives an appreciative nod, then tells me that he still thinks about a piece of advice he was given when studying at Guildhall: to always treat the highs in the same way as the lows. ‘Just to stay even with it all,’ he adds. ‘With the awards stuff, I don’t want to get carried away, because everything is fluid. There will be moments where sh*t is going really well, and there’ll be times where it’s really rough, and you need to stay balanced.’

I expect there are more highs than lows to come for Ben-adir. He laughs when I say this and assures me he’s still a work-in-progress. But yes, he admits, ‘This is just the beginning.’ Public voting for the EE Rising Star Awards is now open at ee.co.uk/bafta and the winner will be announced at the EE British Academy Film Awards on Sunday 11th April

‘THERE WILL BE HIGHS AND LOWS, BUT YOU NEED TO STAY BALANCED’