Kingsley Ben-Adir is hitting his vape at the clip that most people sip beer, telling me a story about smoking weed on the way to Dave Chappelle’s house. (“I fucking nearly whited, man. I was on the tour-bus van, heading down to the party, and I had to put my feet up in the air to get blood back into my head.”) We’re borrowing a C-suiter’s office at Paramount’s Times Square headquarters, and the thermostat is jacked diabolically high. The thirty-seven-year-old British actor is here to promote Bob Marley: One Love (out this Valentine’s Day), and he’s flown overseas for the first round of promotional duties. That’s all to say: This could be a tedious work trip, but it’s immediately clear that I’m talking with a man who has mastered the art of having fun on the job.
A brief history of that work: Ben-Adir grew up in London; conquered the theatre circuit (surprise: a lot of Shakespeare); and, in 2020, portrayed an anxious, tender Malcolm X in One Night in Miami. This past summer, he played one of the many Kens in Barbie. He didn’t have a “job” the way Ryan Gosling’s Ken did (“beach,” as you will almost certainly recall). Instead, his Ken “just looks to Ken-Ryan to see what’s good,” Ben-Adir explains. Character development went like this: “I just thought he should always be holding something for him.”
Ben-Adir did his mandatory Marvel duty on last summer’s Secret Invasion, as a sociopathic alien opposite Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury. The Disney+ show was panned, but there’s a scene worth catching in which the two men are alone in a room, trading blows. Asked about this moment of genuine cinema, Ben-Adir says, “It was supposed to be that.” He slows down and looks me right in the eye, trying to convey, I think, that the whole damn series could have been so much more if it had been edited differently. “Marvel, in their stories, are constantly changing and evolving as you shoot, which sometimes is good and sometimes really difficult as an actor to keep up,” he says.
This is rare candour about what is arguably the most powerful machine in Hollywood. But “I’m so glad that I was part of it,” he says later, sounding like he means it. He isn’t being interview-nice. He’s being third-drink-with-a- coworker-nice. Ben-Adir’s at the point in his career where the work starts coming with perks. Like the freedom to say no—which is what he planned to do, at first, when One Love’s director, Reinaldo Marcus Green, asked him to audition for the role of Bob Marley. “I just was like, ‘I’m not the right person for Bob.’ I just felt that strongly,” he says. The whole thing was risky: He couldn’t sing. He couldn’t play the guitar. But the filmmakers pushed him to make an audition tape, and sure enough, the Marley family wanted to meet him. “I just couldn’t walk away from it, because it felt pretty dangerous. I had absolutely no idea where to start. It’s weird excitement in that.”
To help him out, Barbie director Greta Gerwig carved out a space behind the Kens’ Mojo Dojo Casa House on set (no joke) where Ben-Adir could work on his Marley-isms between takes. Based on the One Love footage I’ve seen, that work paid off. His voice is raw, implacable, Marley-esque but not an imitation. He nails the way Marley always seemed to exist on a plane inaccessible to the rest of us.
The film traces two frantic, intense years of Marley’s life, from an attempted assassination in 1976 to 1978’s One Love Peace Concert. There’s singing, and a lot of it. Initially Ben-Adir assumed he could mime and lip-sync his way through the music. But there was something hollow about that method. “Fuck that,” he remembers thinking. “I need to start learning about the creation of music, what it feels like to play, write a song, and sing. You can’t mime Bob. It’s too much spirit.” To get in the spirit, Ben-Adir may have employed the services of—there it is again—a little bit of ganja. The concert scenes? Why not. But it was downright impractical to dabble during the dramatic work—many of the extras were Jamaican locals, and they absolutely brought their own goodies. “There’s a scene where we’re around the Rasta circle and one of the guys was like, ‘Can’t be smoking this herbal tobacco! We have to have the real thing out of respect to Bob.’ It’s this huge bong. I’m sitting there going, ‘These guys aren’t actors. I’m going to have to do this fifteen times. I can’t.’ ” Ben-Adir opted not to go full Method. Having fun on the job has its limits, even for a man this good at it.
Opening image credits: Coat and shirt by Loewe; jeans and loafers by Gucci; socks by Falke.
Story by Brady Langmann
Photographs by Billy Kidd
Styling by Nick Sullivan
Grooming by Jenny Sauce
Design Director: Rockwell Harwood
Contributing Visuals Director: James Morris
Executive Producer, Video: Dorenna Newton
Executive Director, Entertainment: Randi Peck
