How Eli Goree Brought a Young Muhammad Ali to Life in 'One Night in Miami'
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Regina King knows all the actorly shortcuts, which isn’t surprising as she has four Emmys, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award under her belt. “There were so many times I would try to do little actor tricks to try and get to moments, or to try to manufacture certain situations, and she was just so sharp,” says Eli Goree, who plays a young Muhammad Ali in King’s feature directorial debut, One Night in Miami. “It was like with your parents—you can never get away with nothing, because they've done it all before. She's just like, ‘Just stop, listen. Trust the words, trust the script, trust the other actors, trust yourself, and in those moments when things are supposed to be special, it'll happen, if you're honest and if you're invested in the work.’”
For Goree, the self-described “rookie” in the film’s cast, working on One Night in Miami was “a masterclass for me as an actor. I just grew daily.” Now, he’s garnering enthusiastic reviews for his performance as Ali at 22-years-old, when he was still known as Cassius Clay and had most of his days of being vilified and hero-worshipped still ahead of him. The movie tells the story of the real-life gathering of Clay and his friends, civil rights icon Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), soul music architect Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), and football legend Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), right after the boxer won his first heavyweight championship in 1964. Based on a 2013 play by Soul co-writer and director Kemp Powers, the film, which imagines the four men passing the evening discussing the fight for Black equal rights and their roles and responsibilities as some of the most famous Black men on the planet, is already gathering Oscar buzz. Rookie though he might be, Goree landed the role of the movie’s most outsized personage–and just as that championship fight was one of the biggest breaks of Ali’s career, One Night in Miami finds the young actor on his largest stage yet.
“People had often said, ‘Oh, you resemble a young Cassius Clay,’” says the 26-year-old Goree. “So I was like, ‘That’s cool, maybe there’ll be an opportunity one day.’” But while the resemblance came naturally, the rest required work. With the help of Tré Cotten, “one of the few black male dialect coaches around,” Goree developed his take on Ali’s warm and hearty Kentucky drawl, a voice that’s simultaneously instantly recognizable and yet subtle enough to defy easy caricature. Then there was the physical regimen: the boxing training, and the workouts which added 20 pounds of muscle to his frame to more closely approximate Clay’s physique.
Like millions around the world, Goree, a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, grew up feeling as though Ali was a much-beloved distant relation. “My grandmother had a picture of him up on her wall with all of her Black heroes, and my mom told me the first time she heard a Black person say that they were beautiful on television was when he said it, and that it meant so much to her,” he says. His love of acting has similarly childhood-deep roots, to his early role as one of the kids on Sesame Park, Canada’s version of Sesame Street. Far from the child star hothouse of Los Angeles, acting then was “almost like a hobby,” he says, “Like, ‘I play basketball and sometimes I do these artsy things.’" Later, he moved to Toronto, where he secured his first agent (“It was like a perfect mix because we were both awful—he was always on vacation, and I was always not knowing my lines, and we both didn’t know what the hell we were doing”) and then, as his career blossomed, he moved first to Vancouver, and then to Los Angeles. Along the way, he’s appeared in series including Glow and The 100, and he has recurring roles on Ballers and Riverdale.
One Night in Miami may be Goree’s biggest break yet, but it’s not his first attempt at playing Ali. He auditioned for an Ang Lee film that was to dramatize the rivalry between Ali and Joe Frazier, which culminated in 1975’s Thrilla in Manilla, considered one of the best bouts in history. He made it deep into the audition process. “I met with Ang Lee, I thought I was going to get it. And they went with another guy.” Though the Lee project never materialized, that other guy ended up being his future co-star Ben-Adir, who plays Malcolm X in Miami. “I didn't find out until later, which is good because I was devastated,” says Goree. “I’m just glad he aged out of Cassius, because I don’t want to be auditioning up against that brother no more, ever!”
Goree not the first performer to play the boxer—Will Smith earned an Academy Award nomination with his portrayal in 2001’s Ali. The film deployed flashbacks and outlined a full decade of the pugilist’s career, taking the then-traditional biopic approach of treating icons’ lives as narratives to be unfurled. Instead, Miami offers a snapshot of its subjects at a moment in which Cassius Clay was more the charming kid who performed magic tricks on The Ed Sullivan Show than the titan he would become.
There’s something refreshing about the fact that the film’s most familiar figure is played by its newcomer. With all due respect to the Meryl Streeps and Joaquin Phoenixes of the world, legend itself can become weighty baggage, hefted onto the screen like a clanking backpack full of gilded statuettes. Goree offers a portrayal of Ali that’s as buoyant and fresh as Clay was after the fight, when he famously declared, “I don’t have a mark on my face, and I upset Sonny Liston, and I just turned 22-years-old—I must be the greatest!” It’s the perfect complement to Ben-Adir’s shyly thoughtful Malcolm X, Odom’s pragmatic Cooke, and Hodge’s quietly watchful Brown. When Kemp wrote his original play, he imagined that it could be like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders. “Everyone who was in it ended up being a star,” he told IndieWire. “Swayze, Cruise, Macchio, Lowe, and Dillon.” (Diane Lane and Emilio Estevez, too.) The quartet in One Night in Miami has a similar feel.
One Night in Miami also feels very much like a film delivered at the right time—though, as Goree notes, its Civil Rights-era themes are timeless. “As Black people, the stakes are always incredibly high with these issues in America,” he says. “When the play was written, it was relevant. When Trayvon Martin died, it was relevant. In 2016, it was relevant. Unfortunately, this stuff is evergreen.”
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But the movie’s core conflicts over the social responsibilities that talent and fame bring Black American notables seems particularly resonant to performers today. “You have to be above reproach in what it is that you’re called to do,” says Goree. “The thing that really made [Ali] is that he put boxing first and foremost. As an artist, the first thing—and I think Regina does this really well—is to make the thing great. Make a great film, tell a great story, do a great performance. And then if you have something that you can contribute to society or an opinion that’s important to you, that gives you a platform.”
In his boxing training, Goree gained further understanding of the champion. “One of the sayings in boxing is that the goal is to hit and not get hit,” he says. “And I think that that's something that Muhammad Ali carried with him in his life. To say something and not be held back or contained by the response. Stay on your toes, always moving, always dancing, never a stationary target, never able to be kept in one place by what people expected.”
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