Kingsley BenAdir Interview One Night in Miami

Kingsley Ben-Adir Interview: One Night in Miami

We interview One Night in Miami star Kingsley Ben-Adir about his performance as Malcolm X in the film, which has earned widespread praise.

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One of the key figures in Black America history is Malcolm X, and One Night In Miami shows him in an entirely new light than the one viewing audiences are used to. The historical fiction film, out on January 15 via Amazon Prime Video, gather him and several other legends for a personal meeting that reveals key details about their inner selves.

Kingsley Ben-Adir, who portrays the activist in the movie, spoke to Screen Rant about uncovering his softer side and going all the way in his performance.

Your performance of Malcolm X in this film is phenomenal. There’s very few historical figures larger than Malcolm X in recent black history. While many actors have portrayed the civil rights icon, what did you want to add to the conversation with your portrayal?

Kingsley Ben-Adir: I wanted to really look into who Malcolm was in private – the father, the husband. The stakes for Malcolm at this time, the monumental changes, the shifts in his political thinking and religious thinking, the relationship with the Nation of Islam that was crumbling… It was a really mad time for him.

The sweet, kind and bashful, good-humored Malcolm was what really interested me. And the Malcolm who must have felt kind of scared. I’m really trying to investigate what that might have felt like for him.

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This is also one of the first times we see Malcolm as the father and the husband. We get to see him laugh a little bit, and he was a prankster. Can you talk to me about some of those nuances you wanted to add to the character and some of the research you did to get those nuances?

Kingsley Ben-Adir: Malcolm was funny, man. The more and more I watched him, especially in Harlem, there’s just moments where he’s talking to the crowd and he’s in his zone. He’ll go from talking about really serious political subjects and moments, and then he’ll just have everyone in stitches. The man had a real sense of humor.

I think the most beautiful thing that I heard was that Malcolm said to his friend, Dick Gregory, around this time, that he felt weak and that he felt hollow. That no one knew the torments that he went through. He was going through a lot at this time, and I think it was a big moment for him. I wanted to sort of check in with that. I wanted to show the decent human being that he was; just a normal guy.

Can you talk to me about Sam and Malcolm’s relationship throughout the course of this movie?

Kingsley Ben-Adir: Something real beautiful I found out was that, in Sam’s car after he died, they found the Mohammed Speaks paper and lots of information about the Nation of Islam. So, ho knows what that means. And a bottle of whiskey, I think, was in there as well.

But the emotional charge in the conversation between these two, just in reading the script, that was what blew me away. It was the argument between those two. I was like, “Oh, my God.” I was supposed to audition to play Cassius, and I was just like, “I want to play Malcolm.” Because there’s something about that debate between those two that I just connected to, and I found it so deeply interesting that the conflict between the two in this movie is the heart and center of it.

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And it was a joy to get to play those scenes with Leslie; it really was. We went for each other. We made an agreement before we started: should we try and do some stuff? Do you want to throw each other off, get a bit improvisational and play games and stuff? We did that, and it got a little dark sometimes, but it was all in the spirit of trying to create something as emotionally impactful as we could possibly create.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/one-night-miami-kingsley-ben-adir-interview/

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