The Big Picture

Playing Bob Marley was Kingsley Ben-Adir’s most challenging role yet, balancing his public image and personal vulnerability.
The film doesn’t water down Marley’s accent, requiring audiences to lean in and listen, a choice commended by the studio.
Ben-Adir felt joy and pressure in portraying Marley, with support from the singer’s family and friends on set.

Kingsley Ben-Adir is coming off a banner year with 2023’s Oscar-nominated Barbie and the Disney+ Marvel series, Secret Invasion. In both, the actor was a scene-stealer, and the projects highlighted Ben-Adir’s range from lovably goofy to somewhat deranged. This year, he takes top of the call sheet as the iconic reggae superstar in Bob Marley: One Love.

Despite his previous roles as President Barack Obama in Showtime’s The Comey Rule and Malcolm X in Regina King’s Civil Rights drama, One Night in Miami, Ben-Adir tells Collider’s Steve Weintraub that taking on the leading role in One Love proved to be his most challenging project yet. Set in the late seventies, Reinaldo Marcus Green’s biopic focuses on a tumultuous time in Marley’s career when the singer-songwriter was caught between spreading his message for social reform and balancing his public image as he soared to global prominence.

During their conversation, which you can watch in the video above or read below, Ben-Adir talks about the importance of nailing Marley’s Jamaican accent, working with the singer’s family and friends, and portraying a more vulnerable side to Marley that even those closest to him may be surprised by.

Bob Marley: One Love A look at the life of legendary reggae musician Bob Marley.Release Date February 14, 2024 Main Genre Drama

COLLIDER: There’s going to be younger people that have never heard Bob Marley’s music and I’m just curious, if someone has never heard any Bob Marley, what’s the song or two you think they should start with?

KINGSLEY BEN-ADIR: The young people? I guess it depends on who the young person is. I think Exodus is a great starting point, and then you can work back and then go a bit further in time. I think just the album was wonderful. “Natural Mystic.” Let’s say “Natural Mystic.” I think that’s a stroke of genius. That tune carries a heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy vibration, and I think that was the intention. And you do, you feel it the way it creeps in and the way it builds and what Bob is saying in that song. It blows my mind. So, yeah, “Natural mystic.”

If I’m not mistaken, you have played Barack Obama, Malcolm X, and now Bob Marley. Is the next project you playing God? Where does it go after these three?

BEN-ADIR: [Laughs] I don’t know. Maybe just see what comes in.

Related The 10 Best Kingsley Ben-Adir Movies & TV Shows, Ranked By Rotten Tomatoes The gifted actor has been making a name for himself through the years.

Becoming Bob Marley
Image by Annamaria Ward

I’m joking around. It’s just your ability. It’s crazy these performances. But I am curious, with Bob Marley, he is such an iconic person. When you found out you got the role was it a mixture of 50% excitement and 50%, “How am I going to do this?”

BEN-ADIR: I guess so at the beginning, yeah. But it was clear from the beginning that the family were going to be there, that we wanted to make a movie that was going to share a more personal side to Bob. It was a movie that was going to try and tap into his vulnerability and to share with his friends and the audience a side to him that we don’t know outside of the idea, outside of the iconic status. Bob is a human being. And I knew I had to support there, so it was scary but it was exciting. No one forced me to do it. I wanted to do it. It was a joy and a blessing. Of course, there’s always challenges, and it’s a process. The pressure was appropriate because there was so much to learn to play and sing, and Jamaican patois. Lucky the family were there.

Why ‘Bob Marley: One Love’ Was a Joyous Challenge for Kingsley Ben-Adir

One of the things that I was really blown away by with the film is that it didn’t try to water down Bob’s accent. As an audience member, because I’m not as familiar with it, I had to really lean in and listen to make sure I was understanding. I just commend the studio for allowing this rather than making it some English version.

BEN-ADIR: Me too. I definitely agree. The first conversation, the first night I met Ziggy — it was also the same evening I met Brian Robbins and the heads of Paramount — it was the first thing that we spoke about.It was the most important thing to all of us, and that was agreed on from the beginning. So, that was never an issue. It was something that we knew going into this: how Bob spoke is going to be how he speaks in the film. It was challenging, and it made the process different to anything I’ve ever done before, but it was joyous. I had Bob’s friends and family and a cast of Jamaicans to lift me and lift the project up. Normally, you have one dialect coach on set. With this, we had eight or nine. We had a whole team.

Bob Marley: One Love premieres in theaters on February 14.

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