Kingsley Ben-Adir didn't initially think he could play Bob Marley

The actor talks about the daunting task of stepping into the role of the reggae icon for the biopic 'One Love' and the "Bob station" he set up in Barbie Land while prepping for the job.

By the time Ziggy Marley approached Kingsley Ben-Adir to play his late father in the upcoming biographical film Bob Marley: One Love, the actor had already portrayed the likes of Malcolm X and Barack Obama on screen. Having played those fabled figures, however, didn’t do much to quell his trepidation about stepping into the role of the reggae icon.

“There were a lot of reservations,” Ben-Adir, 37, tells EW over Zoom from his native U.K. “I was completely convinced that there’s no point in auditioning for this. I can’t sing. I can’t dance.” He later quips, “My question was if they'd been on a worldwide search and they said yes. And I said maybe they should go on another one.”

But the role kept coming back to him. Finally, he surrendered to assembling an audition tape, first spending a weekend studying Marley’s performances and becoming particularly “obsessed” with his 1977 performance of “War” at London’s Rainbow Theater. With a vote of confidence from Ziggy, who produced the biopic alongside mother Rita, sister Cedella, and wife Orly (an executive producer), his road to embodying the reggae pioneer and activist began. 

Directed by King Richard’s Reinaldo Marcus Green, One Love offers an intimate portrait of Marley’s life and fame, tracing the assassination attempt against him in December 1976 to his historic performance at the One Love Peace Concert in Kingston, Jamaica in April 1978, which sought to bridge unity amidst the volatile political crisis between the country’s two major political parties, Jamaica Labour Party and People's National Party. Lashana Lynch also stars as Marley’s wife, Rita.

Ben-Adir learned to sing and play guitar for the role, performing all of the songs with his own voice during filming. “Not necessarily well all of the time,” he notes. “I butchered a lot of people's ears for many days." The final cut blends his voice with Marley's archival recordings. "Bob’s not someone you can choreograph or copy," Ben-Adir continues. "His singing and dancing is from an internal experience, so you really have to find your own version of that for yourself.”

“The more I dug into Bob,” he adds, “the more I realized that music was really everything to him. It really saved him, and he separated himself from other artists around that time.”

The actor also pored over more than 50 rare archival Marley interviews to absorb as much of his Jamaican Patois as he could, transcribing every single one over the course of several months. “I recruited Jamaicans to come to my house to help me translate the bits I didn't understand, and we ended up with this document that was hundreds of pages of Bob speak, written out phonetically,” Ben-Adir recalls.

It was while filming Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, playing one of the many Kens, that his prep began. “I actually set up a Bob station in Barbie Land,” he shares. “There was a point where I thought we were starting sooner than we were, so I told Greta that once we finished the scene, I needed to go back to the trailer. So I’d do a take and then run to the Bob station and transcribe. The overlap was interesting.”

Of the tonally different projects, he says, “It was wonderful to have such a positive acting experience before diving into a very lonely place.”

Much has been said about Austin Butler’s method approach to Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic, but Ben-Adir says, “I don’t really understand it.” He had his own approach to the reggae icon, who died in May 1981 from melanoma at just 36. “It’s about knowing what it is you’re trying to achieve,” he explains. “There's a degree to which you have to stay in it, but that's a state of concentration; that's not walking around pretending to be the character. If you need to spend a few minutes before doing what you need to do, that's all for between action and cut, and to separate yourself after that so you can have a conversation about what it is you need to do to improve the scene.”

“I feel like walking around and being in it can draw the attention unnecessarily away from everything else and just have it on you the whole time,” he adds. “But if people need to do that to stay in their state of concentration, then fair enough.”

Bob Marley: One Love is in theaters Feb. 14.

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