You’d be forgiven for not fairly understanding the place you’ve seen Kingsley Ben-Adir earlier than. He was, for years, a gradual presence on the London stage, doing A Midsummer Night time’s Dream in Regent’s Park, A lot Ado About Nothing on the Outdated Vic, and new dramas together with Gillian Slovo’s The Riots on the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn and Arinze Kene’s God’s Property on the Soho Theatre. However his work in tv and movie has been quieter, characterised by principally supporting components in initiatives like Peaky Blinders, The OA, Excessive Constancy, and, final yr, Marvel’s Secret Invasion and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. (It was little greater than intuition that pulled him away from the theater; in 2014, in opposition to his then agent’s recommendation, Ben-Adir declined a suggestion to make his West Finish debut in Shakespeare in Love, decided, he says, that he ought to “get some digicam expertise.”)

But it feels unusual to name the 37-year-old a personality actor—not solely due to his marquee-​idol beauty and reedy six-foot-two body, but additionally as a result of, over the previous few years, Ben-Adir has developed a knack for taking part in Nice Males. In 2020, shortly after showing as Barack Obama in Showtime’s The Comey Rule, he popped up once more as Malcolm X in Regina King’s One Night time in Miami…, a component that received him the Gotham Award for breakthrough actor. (“I used to be like, ‘I didn’t know you may get nominated for breakthrough work at 34,’ ” he joked on the time.)

Ben-Adir continues the theme this winter with Bob Marley: One Love, starring as the long-lasting Jamaican reggae singer, songwriter, and Rastafarian reverse Lashana Lynch as Marley’s spouse, Rita. Narrowing its focus to an particularly turbulent chapter in his life, the movie captures Marley’s close to assassination in Kingston in 1976; his subsequent flight to Europe, the place he recorded and toured Exodus, his ninth studio album, in 1977; after which his triumphant return to Jamaica for the One Love Peace Live performance in April 1978—an occasion attended by over 30,000 folks. (A number of years later, in 1981, Marley would die from melanoma at 36.) King Richard’s Reinaldo Marcus Inexperienced directs, with Rita and two of her youngsters, Ziggy and Cedella, aboard as producers.

The half was so plum—and appeared so completely fallacious for him—that in the first place, Ben-Adir thought going up for it will be a waste of time. “Years in the past you’d get despatched an audition and also you’d begin going, There’s no level in me taping for this, as a result of Leonardo DiCaprio goes to play it,” he says. “You can begin smelling the sense of, That is sort of too good.” And, anyway, Ben-Adir couldn’t actually sing, he couldn’t actually dance, he positively couldn’t play the guitar, and he’d not too long ago bulked as much as 215 kilos for Secret Invasion. “I’m like, Something I do is simply going to place them off.”

However the stakes modified when he noticed an early model of King Richard, and understood that the Marley household could be watching his tape immediately. “So then there’s a sort of stress to it,” he says, flashing a sly smile. “There’s a little bit of hazard. So I assumed, What’s the hurt?”

It’s at all times been a few feeling for Ben-Adir. Additionally, usually, tears.

We’re on the Manhattan workplaces of Paramount Photos, in a snug (if oddly rectangular) room behind the studio’s personal theater. Wearing a marled blue quarter-zip sweater and tan joggers, a tiny gold hoop winking discreetly from one ear, he’s vividly describing his teenage years in northwest London, because the late Nineteen Nineties changed into the early aughts, when he was starting to fall in love with efficiency.