Preparing for Bob Marley: One Love Is Why Kingsley Ben-Adir Doesn’t Play Guitar in Barbie

Liz Shannon Miller
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The post Preparing for Bob Marley: One Love Is Why Kingsley Ben-Adir Doesn’t Play Guitar in Barbie appeared first on Consequence.

Kingsley Ben-Adir knows exactly what he hopes Bob Marley: One Love says to viewers today. “I feel like that idea of togetherness and community and bringing people together — the message in the film that’s so important is understanding that that’s what Bob Marley was like as a human being, when it came to creating music,” he tells Consequence. “He was big on involving everyone. If you didn’t play an instrument, he’d encourage you to pick something up, even if it was just a spoon and a little bottle. He wanted everyone involved.”

You get to see this spirit in action during the new biopic, which features Ben-Adir as the famed musician during a key period of his life, including the creation of the iconic Exodus. “It was an extraordinary experience,” Ben-Adir says. “I got to know Bob and to learn about him as a human being, as a father with the people who knew him as a human being and as a father. It was a really unique process.”

Prior to the filming of One Love, Ben-Adir worked on a very different movie — in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, he plays Basketball Ken, one of Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling)’s closest allies. Filming on that project took three months, and because “there’s a lot of downtime when you’re shooting,” he did some of his prep work for playing Bob Marley in between takes, keeping a guitar and “Bob’s interviews” nearby on set.

“There was so much to learn, you know, in terms of the music, in terms of the language, everything,” he says. “Chords take a long time to sink in, with the guitar, you go through many stages and you hit walls and you hit blocks where it takes a few weeks to get through them.”

Funnily enough, while Ben-Adir was literally learning the guitar during production, he’s the only Ken in the film who isn’t seen playing the instrument on screen — specifically in the film’s Matchbox 20 tribute, where all the respective Kens serenade supposedly-brainwashed Barbies with their rendition of “Push.”

Says Ben-Adir, “I remember we all came in for rehearsal and we talked through the scene and then Greta [Gerwig] just said, ‘Someone’s gotta play the drums, who wants to play the drums?’ And my hand shot up. I went, ‘Me!’ Because I just wanted the afternoon on the drum kit — I can’t play the drums, but I know like one little beat, and I’d been playing the guitar all morning and yeah, I just needed a little break.”

Ben-Adir has played several well-known real-life figures at this point in his career, including Malcolm X in Regina King’s One Night in Miami and Barack Obama in the limited series The Comey Rule. Capturing the famed reggae singer, though, was different, because “he spent his life creating great music, music that’s transcended and become a part of all of our lives and the culture. That’s what made this different and that was huge, but that’s what made it really appealing to me. I felt that there was something dangerous about that. I’d watch him on stage and in concert and I didn’t understand anything that was happening, but I just knew that it was so powerful, and that I couldn’t stop watching.”

For the film’s many music sequences, often featuring Ben-Adir performing live in front of a real crowd, the size of the crowd didn’t really matter — the challenge was recreating what he’d learned in front of an audience of any size. “It is one thing playing and singing in your bedroom when you’re on your own — really, I mastered a lot of it in the bedroom. But then coming out and doing it in front of people who actually play music… Coming out in front of a Jamaican crowd in Jamaica, who are all looking at you going, ‘What you got?'”

Continues Ben-Adir, “It’s great, though because when there’s that intensity, you have to go straight at it. And when you come out the other end, you feel like you’ve learned something or you’ve grown. I loved doing those concerts in Jamaica. I’m just coming out on the mic and doing ‘Bob talk’ and all of that. I was trying to win them over.”

One Love takes a more narrow focus than other biopics, beginning with the 1976 shooting that nearly killed Marley, his wife Rita (played by Lashana Lynch), and other members of Marley’s team (miraculously, all of them survived). Starting the film with that moment of violence, Ben-Adir says, brought him “the understanding that out of that trauma came [Exodus], this masterpiece. They all nearly died that night, and Bob left Jamaica and stayed in London for nearly two years, and within a few months they had finished the album and were on tour. Understanding that, the connection of those two things — we needed to pay attention to that.”

In addition, the film is able to depict how “that was a very, very intense period of time in London. Bob was working at a very, very intense pace and there was a seriousness about the work that felt different and didn’t always feel fun. But he was on a mission — nearly dying can cause that. And just the idea of trauma and what it means to not feel safe personally, physically was something that I became a little bit obsessed with. And in that way, understanding Bob as a human being, understanding that trauma and understanding his whole life in a way as a child.”

It all leads, eventually, to the film being able to highlight “the journey and the cost, and what it took Bob to arrive at that message of peace and love and unity and togetherness. He didn’t just wake up one morning and come out with it. It was a lifelong journey for him, and it took a lot for him to get there.”

Bob Marley: One Love arrives in theaters on Wednesday, February 14th. Check out the trailer below.

Preparing for Bob Marley: One Love Is Why Kingsley Ben-Adir Doesn’t Play Guitar in Barbie
Liz Shannon Miller

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