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When Kingsley Ben-Adir was playing Basketball Ken for the 2023 film “Barbie,” he booked the role of Bob Marley in “One Love.”
During breaks on the Greta Gerwig film, “Barbie,” Ben-Adir was preparing to play the music legend.
“I was doing basic chord work and then just absorbing the interviews for the first time. I just started listening to it in Barbieland and transcribing stuff,” he revealed to KTLA 5’s Sam Rubin.
While the two films are vastly different, it didn’t seem to bother the “Peaky Blinders” actor at all.
“I thought it was the most sensible thing to do,” he explained.
As for Marley’s portrayal on-screen, director Reinaldo Marcus Green, purposely used the icon’s own music and voice instead of having Ben-Adir attempting to sing.
“If I’m going to the movie, I want to hear Bob Marley, that was number one,” he said.
He also explained how he was taken aback by Ben-Adir’s audition tape, not only by his performance but by the purposeful way it was recorded.
“It was like watching a fresh new face. It was captivating. It was something special,” he explained. “It was something different than all of the rest of the tapes. He was really smart about shooting in profile, so you can kind of only get a glimpse of his face. I thought, ‘Okay, this guy’s really intelligent. There’s something going on behind the eye here.’”
Ben-Adir told Sam that he asked the camera person to come in “really tight” on his face.
“I just wanted them to see my eyes and to get a feeling,” he said. “One of the scenes was to sing and play the guitar, which I couldn’t do. So I sort of left that out.”
It was important for him to give the filmmakers a glimpse and not to “overdo it.”
“They send you nine scenes for a pilot and then you spend a week learning these nine scenes, you never hear back. It’s like, all they need is to see a moment,” he explained. “But that took me a while to get there. So I wouldn’t advise any young actors to do that. If they send you nine scenes, take the nine scenes.”
“Bob Marley: One Love” hits theaters on Feb. 14.
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