Kingsley Ben-Adir interview: ‘Bob Marley: One Love’

Kingsley Ben-Adir admits that it was “a little bit overwhelming” to tackle the role of legendary reggae star Bob Marley in “Bob Marley: One Love” because of “the amount of new things that I was gonna have to get a hold of,” from his music to his language, “but I was also up for the challenge, and after I met [Bob Marley’s son Ziggy Marley, who produced the film,] and I spoke to the family, I really felt like I couldn’t walk away from it. It was too incredible an opportunity.” Watch our complete video interview with Ben-Adir above.

“One Love” tracks Marley’s life and career from the 1970s, when political violence drove him and his family from Jamaica, to his death from cancer in 1981, when he was just 36-years-old. The Marley family was involved in the production throughout; along with Ziggy Marley, the film was produced by Bob’s widow Rita Marley and their daughter Cedella Marley. “It was ongoing,” Ben-Adir remembers. “There were conversations with the family and friends and people who knew Bob all the way through to the end … Neville Garrick, who was on the ‘Exodus’ tour with Bob, and lived in the house, and wrote down the songs as Bob composed them in the bedroom in a notebook, was in the room with me when we were composing the songs and trying to figure them out. It was really mind-blowing.”

The Jamaican patois was the most challenging aspect of the role. “It’s a different language,” the actor explains. “I spent months and months transcribing all of Bob’s interviews … The Jamaican community from where I come from started coming over to my apartment, helped me break them down.” And it changed depending on the context: “When he didn’t want to be understood, he would speak like this. If he was being clear for a European journalist, he would speak like this. When he was in the studio, he would speak like this.”

As for the music of Bob Marley, “I don’t sing and I don’t play the guitar,” Ben-Adir reveals. “I got to spend many, many months listening to him and talking about music with experts. And I think even separate to the film, I just find that really interesting. Ziggy and family, they’re musicians, they’re creative, so I would talk to them about acting, and they would talk to me about music, and there was kind of a universal language that we had different ways of expressing.” Even still, “the singing, to me, was a journey. I was scared.”

But the actor was determined to learn how to play the guitar instead of faking it for the cameras. “Bob had a guitar in his hand every day of his life from when he was 13. That’s what he did every day. He woke up, he played the guitar. He was up until three in the morning, then up at six playing the guitar. So I wanted to understand what that felt like.” Marley and Ben-Adir are also quite different physically and vocally, “so we really had to focus on the essence, the rhythm of language, the specificity of patois.” But “I loved the music. I loved studying his music … It was an education for me.”