It's Time to Listen to John Boyega. Again.
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John Boyega would not lie down. It was 2021, and he was filming an early scene for this summer’s blistering sci-fi conspiracy thriller They Cloned Tyrone on set in Atlanta. In the script, Boyega’s street-hustler character, Fontaine, reconvenes with an irritable pimp named Slick Charles, played by Jamie Foxx, and sex worker Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) at her grandmother’s house, still reeling from what they just saw (an apparent conspiracy). The scene called for Boyega to lie flat on the bed, staring at the ceiling as they talk. Boyega lay there and sucked his teeth.
“Not feelin’ it, bruv,” the thirty-one-year-old actor told the film’s director and cowriter, Juel Taylor, in his charmingly peppery South London accent. “I’m alert, bruv. I’m alert. I’m on edge.” Boyega figured Fontaine wouldn’t be in a passive position. It didn’t feel natural. They filmed him sitting up.
In a later scene, Fontaine and the gang confront a gravel-voiced white villain. (The less said about this character, the better, to avoid spoilers.) A crane shot had been set up solely to push in on Boyega lying down, this time on the ground. “There’s no way I’m still on the ground,” Boyega said. They reset the shot.
Call it the power of John Boyega in action. “If he says, ‘This don’t feel right,’ I’m gonna listen,” Taylor explains over the phone. “If you’re gonna be a leading man, there has to be some kind of gravity around you, and John definitely has that in spades. He commands the room, even if the character he’s playing is somebody low on the totem pole, so to speak.”
It’s taken Boyega a while to be able to comfortably flex. After a youth spent anchoring a stupendously profitable blockbuster franchise, he’s proved himself as a performer who can seemingly do anything, onscreen or off. He made headlines for speaking frankly about how Disney sidelined his Star Wars character. The experience was brutal, but made him want to bring his most unfettered self to his work. These days, he has more control over his career than ever before and considers himself a collaborator with the directors he works with now.
He has also actively defied being typecast, most recently starring as a bank-robbing Marine vet in last year’s Breaking and as a nineteenth-century West African monarch in the Viola Davis–led The Woman King. His latest character, Fontaine, is the grounding force in a trippy universe where Black people are being lied to in multiple dimensions. The role immediately thrilled Boyega, a lover of dark humor and provocation. Lately he’s been taking big swings to fuel big ambitions, and filmmakers, producers, castmates, and audiences instinctively trust his choices. He could do anything, but what he most wants is an eclectic Joaquin Phoenix– or Tilda Swinton–type range. Somehow when Boyega makes this comparison, it’s not remotely obnoxious—he comes off as both confident and totally likable. He is not what he calls “toxic humble.”
What’s that mean? “Toxic humble, to me, is the concept of: I don’t care about the audience. It’s all about my art,” he says during our first call over Zoom in late June. “Come on, man.” He laughs. “Stop it. Like, stop. The audience participates in that, and you are selling it to them. You’ve got to step in and fill that space. You have to step into it.”
When we meet for dinner a week later at the Central Park–adjacent 1 Hotel restaurant Jams, Boyega steps off the elevator in a pajama-like, salmon-colored Armani button-up with matching pants. His chest is out, his skin is glowing, and a durag graces his cornrows. He orders a Shirley Temple, having already eaten and napped. For the past few weeks, Boyega has been zipping across the country promoting They Cloned Tyrone ahead of its release, some of which has involved addressing his costar Jamie Foxx’s recovery from an undisclosed medical condition. It’s an exhausting part of the job that requires not a little diplomacy.
It’s been impossible to ignore Foxx’s absence from the movie’s press run. When I ask Boyega if promoting a film without one of its main stars is weird, he shrugs. “Stuff happens. People get pregnant or have commitments. You just gotta roll with the punches. Netflix has done very well in facilitating the press, and Jamie’s team has been very transparent about what the commitments will be or not,” he says. “I’m the guy who’s like, Cool, you gotta have that privacy, regardless of what you’re going through.”
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In the celebrity-fandom world, though, Foxx’s medical condition has been a hot topic and (ironically, given the movie’s themes) spurred so many conspiracy theories that when Foxx resurfaced in semipublic—first spotted on a boat in Chicago—the press treated it like a sighting of the Loch Ness Monster. Boyega tells me he’s spoken to Foxx but reiterates the importance of privacy. “Let’s control ourselves a bit,” he says, addressing fans. “At the end of the day, you’re curious about somebody you’ve never met. Let’s come back down to reality here. Yes, you care about celebrities and stars, but if that same celebrity is asking for privacy, how come you don’t care about that?”
Boyega himself cultivates the enigmatic air of a classic movie star and doesn’t understand fans’ obsession with him, to the extent he’ll allow that it exists. “Most of my life is mysterious. Like, people do not know about me and how I roll, who I’m with, what I’m doing,” he says. “I get curious about people ’cause of the work they do. Your private life, I’m not trying to get into that too tough unless it’s some criminal crap, like, Oh, I didn’t know that person would do that. Who you’re dating and all that? I don’t have no interest. Also, I go, You don’t really care, though, innit? My mom and dad care about that.”
What’s helped him navigate the nexus of acting and fame is that he refuses to play small. And he isn’t a downer. “Thinking negative, for me, isn’t the way. I define negative as just being truthful. Maybe it’s just me speaking truthfully,” he says, attributing this philosophy to his upbringing. “My parents are dreamers. The biggest dreamers I know. And they made news based on that dream. They left Nigeria, came over to the UK, raised kids. We never spoke of our financial situation or our lack of having as the worst thing that’s ever happened to us,” he says. “I’ve been raised in a household with a culture of believing in things that are not necessarily there now but being willing to put the work into it and see where it goes.”
Canadian wildfire particles have lately made New York feel as though it’s at the flash point. But there’s something else, too. When we speak, WGA writers have been on strike for nearly two months, and Boyega’s own union, SAG-AFTRA, is on the verge of one. Two weeks later, it will officially hit the button, commencing Hollywood’s first double strike since 1960. The last time SAG went on strike alone, in 2000, John Boyega was eight, and Justin Timberlake was the one rocking cornrows.
Boyega fully supports a potential upheaval in his industry to protect against job-killing AI and ensure streaming residuals for actors, which translates to livable salaries for both the Boyegas and the non-Boyegas of the world. It’s a crucial moment for Hollywood that could tip the scales in artists’ favor in a way he’s been advocating for since he survived publicly excoriating Disney for sidelining Stars Wars’ actors of color—a career risk that’s paid off. Those comments Boyega made in 2020–about Disney’s tendency to give more nuanced narratives to the franchise’s white actors–now seem like a battle cry that’s ignited a different kind of star war in Hollywood.
“Once you make certain statements, everybody knows where you stand, so people don’t approach you trying to play the game,” says Boyega. “Since then, I’ve worked with Netflix, I’ve worked with Sony and other studios, and they’re very much aware of how I am, how I operate, and they found that they can still do their job.” For him, seeing the industry unite to correct an imbalance is validating. “When you’re the one actor saying it, it becomes like, Oh my God,” he says. “But I’m glad now.”
The Hollywood he has described as both magical and damaging is in shambles. But what’s happening is resonating across other industries in a world that’s evolving too fast for anyone, save maybe for AI, to keep up. What used to be an internal struggle for Boyega has since turned very public, in the form of the SAG strike. He fundamentally understands the need for equity and transparency from major studios. “Because privacy, with [studio heads], is their safe haven,” he says. “That privacy has protected them and allowed them to make certain decisions with artists. It’s not fair. For something that’s such a group effort, there needs to be more of a balance and a redefinition of what is fair.”
The streaming bubble has burst and doused everything. Boyega is the kind of guy you want to speak to about it. The man can do that impossible thing—chat about cinema from both an insider’s and fanboy’s perspective without sounding pretentious. He’s so enraptured with the idea of moviemaking that he’s still elated to see his face on billboards. Boyega believes the audience interacts with actors “on a neurological level.” It’s heady stuff but not so serious that it would preclude a sense of humor.
At a table in the back of Jams, over the clattering of the kitchen cooks’ pots and pans on a buzzing Friday, he tells me all about how the movie business changed drastically while he was filming Tyrone, amid a Hollywood without movie theaters, one that was forced to put all its faith into streaming.
Like me, Boyega has just watched “Joan Is Awful,” the first episode of Black Mirror’s recent sixth season, in which a streaming-video company called Streamberry exploits people’s likenesses and mobile devices to churn out eerie dramatized reality programming. Boyega doesn’t think this is so far-fetched. “I’m still researching, myself, because all of this is new, like AI using your voice,” he says.
An entirely new business model is evolving for film releases, overhauling the traditional system, with the pandemic giving mid-tier-budget projects a chance to thrive via streaming. “Streaming has been a great opportunity for a lot of us who aren’t necessarily in all the biggest blockbuster films every year. For me, it’s a symptom of change. But I hope there’s a balance. I don’t want to lose cinema,” he says. “You see some streaming services that offer these high-end movies a chance to be in the movie theater for a short amount of time. Although they don’t bloody market it,” Boyega notes, throwing the tiniest bit of shade. (They Cloned Tyrone, it must be said, will hit Netflix this Friday, July 21, a week after its theatrical release.) “But you get to see how both of them can coexist.”
The problem is that studios get coy with sharing streaming numbers, and actors at all income levels miss out on earning the residuals they’d get in the past for syndicated programs. All of this can seem foreign to the average movie lover who doesn’t understand why rich actors are so mad. Boyega’s Star Wars comments were part of a buildup and just the tip of the iceberg. “I’m surprised actors before hadn’t said anything,” he says. “’Cause that’s what creates the whole taboo of it all.”
So why don’t they?
“Some people don’t want to seem ungrateful. Once you get to a position of privilege, is there any debate to have about making privilege better? Can the privileged have problems?” he says. “They don’t want to get involved in it, which I do understand. I understand why people are affected by it. I was affected by it. But I hope more and more people start to see individual actors coming out and just going, Nah. I’m just glad now that the conversations are being had on a mass level, so it doesn’t feel like one actor is a rebel against the system.”
As tough and fiery as Boyega is in person, there’s a vulnerability to him that helps explain why he continually seeks out fairness in a corrupt world. He believes in equity and has faith that things can be right if you just say something. Superhero logic, you could say. But don’t expect to see Boyega in a Marvel movie anytime soon. “I don’t see a space there,” he says. “Years and years ago, I used to want to be in Black Panther. They’ve got that handled. Someone give me a Hancock.”
An audacious conspiracy-driven story like They Cloned Tyrone is much more in line with his creative vibe at the moment. The script became a hot commodity on the Black List, a roundup of movie scripts that haven’t yet been attached to any producer. Boyega was eager to partner with a first-time feature-film director like Taylor, who wasn’t, as he says, “industry trained” and would let Boyega collaborate meaningfully. “I like how real he is. He’s very much raw and doesn’t have that director’s-etiquette thing going,” Boyega says of Taylor. “He’s solely an artist, a creative, and, to me, a genius. I see him as one of the directors we’ll be talking about in the coming years.”
Taylor finds Boyega’s performance of Fontaine effortlessly charismatic. “John brought warmth to the character. On the page, he’s very stoic, obviously the straight man,” says Taylor. “John has this dry wit, humor, and warmth to him that I loved getting to play with.”
Boyega always saw himself in the hero position. Even when he was a classically broke council-estate kid with a jagged hairline and no money for a weekly shape-up, wearing Clarks loafers and a school uniform every day, armed with little but his wits, conversation, and a smile, he felt big. At thirteen, he would drag his boy with him for double dates, traveling forty-five minutes on a double-decker bus from South London to East London to visit a crush. The girl later broke Boyega’s heart—she couldn’t stand the long distance, she said. Today, Boyega wonders if it was something else. “She probably wasn’t digging my clothes. That’s probably what it was,” he says, ejecting a cackle. “I don’t blame her.”
He didn’t have pierced ears and fresh kicks on his feet like other boys. But he carried himself with a certain self-possession. His Nigerian parents—his mother, Abigail, worked as a caregiver, and his father, Samson, was a Pentecostal minister—instilled a sense of pride and principle in John and his two older sisters, Blessing and Grace. “I most definitely wasn’t afraid of rejection back then, even when I knew I wasn’t at the same level as the popular boys,” says Boyega. “You have to grow into yourself a little bit more. Everybody experiences that, where you weren’t always the main chicken in the roost. And it’s cool. It just wasn’t my time.”
While attending Westminster City School, Boyega cycled through local auditions. Around age eleven, he was cast as the lead, Joseph, in a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, an Andrew Lloyd Webber–composed biblical extravaganza. He had to drop the part because his dad had planned the family’s first-ever trip to Nigeria. “I was so upset. I was so upset about that,” Boyega remembers. He hated the thought of playing a secondary role, like one of Joseph’s brothers, God forbid. He didn’t want to do the play at all if he couldn’t be the lead.
Boyega says he went from experiencing zero popularity in high school to being “really confident” in college, as he put himself out there and garnered attention through improv and Identity School of Acting. That’s where he met his drama-teacher-turned-agent Femi Oguns. By then, he’d become the obvious choice to portray the main characters. While studying performing arts at South Thames, he landed his first lead role as Othello in a school production. He found freedom in these transformations and welcomed the chance to show off onstage. “It didn’t make me feel awkward like it made the other kids. I wasn’t as self-aware,” he says.
His breakout role in the fantastical alien-invasion flick Attack the Block, at nineteen, reads almost like a career foreshadowing: An intrepid South Londoner is forced to confront shadowy forces and find a way. At that point, the real-world Boyega was ready to leave structure for the chaos of Hollywood. He was willing to put in the work to get the acting career he wanted. (“And I wanted it bad,” he says.) So he dropped out of the University of Greenwich and split for L.A.
He stepped off the plane and instantly felt big in America. But in true starving-artist fashion, his suitcase was split between worlds. He was a walking Proactiv ad (he barely had money for face cream) and did odd jobs like grocery shopping, laundry, and even cat-sitting for a director out in Santa Monica. He credits his now best friend Asia (whom he met at a house party) for letting him sleep on her living room couch.
For a time, the starry-eyed Boyega imagined Hollywood as a bacchanal, but now he laughs at the thought. “Everyone is just hardworking,” he says. “I haven’t even seen anyone snort white.” As a hungry young actor, he didn’t put on airs. He asked questions and found support. “I was very much open to the lessons of it all, and to be fair, a lot of people spoke to me in that context, knowing that you don’t necessarily know everything,” he says. “And then leaning in to not knowing everything saves you from pretending that you do.”
But then he started to know things. The industry is designed to instill fear in young actors and make them afraid of appearing arrogant for asking for what they want. By the time Boyega was on his Star Wars run, shady Hollywood politics had become too obvious for him to ignore. He’s spent the past few years resetting his priorities to protect his mental health and firing people who didn’t align. He’s refusing to play Joseph’s brother in his own career. “You can’t do what you used to do when I was a young puppy,” he says. “Now I’m at a level where an agent can’t lie to me. You can’t come and tell me, ‘They said….’ I will call them directly, and if I find that you’re lying, you’re outta here.” He laughs heartily. “I had to come to the point of learning that and standing my ground. I had to be the author and finisher of my team. I have to lead you guys. You cannot lead me.”
There’s something about Boyega that makes his appeals for the entire world seem reasonable. He’s the kind of guy who could order one of every item on the menu and make it sound like the singularly correct way to dine out. Example: I ask him what his love language is. He can’t choose and blurts out, “All of them.” I, on the other hand, hadn’t even considered “All of the above” as an option, when it might be the only sensible answer. “I’ve never understood there being a specific one,” Boyega says, looking puzzled. “I mean, who likes touch without getting a gift once in a while? Who likes words of affirmation from someone that doesn’t actually touch? I’m willing to take as much as I can give. But, you know, I’m a softy. I’m chill. I’m spontaneous. And at the same time, I’m curious about people, so I create a space for honesty.”
He hasn’t been in a relationship in four years. The most recent one lasted only a few months. “I’ve never dated a celebrity. Not for any particular reason. I just don’t be going to the parties,” he jokes. Is he a relationship guy? He answers immediately, “No.”
“I want a relationship, but I don’t fixate on it,” he says. “I’m not opposed to it. I just haven’t met anyone that really ignites that in me.”
At this point in the conversation, he’s gotta go. His family and friends are hovering near the restaurant entrance, waiting on him to see The Lion King, of all things. This is what it means to be John Boyega right now, to balance his professional and personal passions and make room for the things he loves: traveling, massages, video games, anime, and diving in the Cayman Islands. The Pisces finds peace in going underwater and seeing a world bigger than his eyes can swallow. “It’s just so much mystery in there,” he says. “To learn how to operate within that as a human being, that’s always cool to me. It’s not my territory, but I feel like a bad man. And I like the tranquility of it all.” It’s illuminating. But then, he says, with a laugh, “All right, time to go up!” He has a leader’s sense of direction. Now it’s everyone else’s turn to move like him.
Story: Clover Hope
Photos: Andre D Wagner
Styling: Taylor McNeill
Grooming: Jeremy Dell
Barber: Lesha Lee
Creative Direction: Nick Sullivan
Design Direction: Rockwell Harwood, Mike Kim
Visuals Direction: Justin O’Neill
Executive Director, Entertainment: Randi Peck
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