Simon Brew sat down with the cast and crew of 2024’s Bob Marley biopic to chat the making of the film. Ziggy Marley stopped by for a natter too…
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #48.
“I just love movies,” beams Ziggy Marley, the son of Bob. He’s sat comfortably in his recording studio in Jamaica, and he’s been pondering; I’ve just asked him about the biopic of his father, One Love: Bob Marley, that’s getting a worldwide release in February. Specifically, I would like to know what he wants from the film?
“I want action, adventure, intrigue: I need some action! I need some violence! I don’t want a boring biopic!”
By the sounds of it, he hasn’t got it, either….
It was back in 2018 that the Marley family decided to pursue the idea of a big-screen biopic of Bob (after turning down many, many approaches over the years), with Paramount Pictures – who’d enjoyed success with the Elton John story, Rocketman – backing the movie.
There’d been a 2012 Marley documentary from British filmmaker Kevin Macdonald (who, uncredited, gave access to his research materials for this film). But this was going to be a full, narrative drama. Terence Winter and Frank E Flowers got working on an initial screenplay, but progress wasn’t speedy. It took a few years of work before the project was ready for the next step: the global search for a director, and the small matter of finding someone to play a man known and revered around the planet.
Heading into 2020, and the world – of course – went into lockdown. In a year where it was hard to find too many positives, those who’d shot their films and were in the edit suite at least had a bit more time to shape their movies.
One such filmmaker was Reinaldo Marcus Green, a writer and director, then in his late 30s, who had two full-length features to his name (2018’s Monsters And Men, and 2020’s Joe Bell). He was editing what was expected to be the biggest film of his career so far, King Richard, starring Will Smith: the story of Venus and Serena Williams and their father, Richard. Green had co-written the feature with Zach Baylin, and Warner Bros would hold its release until November 2021.
It was a delay, and turn of fate, that would work in Green’s favour.
“I think the timing was on my side,” he admits, settled in a comfy London hotel room. “I was coming off a pretty hot film” – one that would win, as you might recall – an Oscar for Will Smith, although he first got the script whilst post-production was being completed on King Richard.
“I only really had a few questions when it came,” he recalls. “One, do you have the music? There was no movie for me without the actual music itself. And then did we have the family’s involvement? Once those two things were secured then even as a baseline, whatever was in the script could be changed, could be fixed, could be elevated.”
He knew the project he was taking on was daunting, but he put in a call to Zach Baylin, and they started reshaping the existing screenplay.
“Kudos to the screenwriters that had brought the script to me, but I just think we were trying to go in a more human direction. I wanted to find who Bob was as a person, what made him tick, what was he like as a father, what was he like as a human being, what was it like being in the room with him when he was creating songs? We had a similar process on King Richard. What can we draw out of the family aspects?”
Reinaldo Marcus Green was on board, then, and that was one global search concluded. But the other was ongoing. Still, just at the right moment, another figure was coming to prominence.
Let’s get together
Dig into the early screen career of London-born actor Kingsley Ben-Adir, and familiar names pop up. He appeared in long-running crime drama Midsomer Murders for instance (“I was a priest”, he tells me, but can’t recall if he was the killer or not), and he booked a key role in another ITV detective drama, Vera. His career escalated with projects such as Peaky Blinders and The OA, but it was a pair of productions landing in 2020 that firmly put him on the One Love radar.
Firstly, he played Barack Obama in the 2020 US mini-series The Comey Rule. Then, Regina King cast him as Malcolm X for her acclaimed drama One Night In Miami… With a BAFTA Rising Star prize added to his home furnishings around this time too, he was accelerating up the list of possibilities. For him, One Night In Miami… was definitely the turning point.
“That was the first time I was collaborating with the directors and producers in a much different way. I was much more involved. I understood how the ordering of certain shots could help from an actor’s point of view.”
His process – and he’s always been big on preparation – evolved for that film as well. “I made sure I turned up on the first day, and I was able to play any movement on that film like the back of my hand,” he tells me. He’s got one eye on producing his own films going forward, and ensured with One Love that he was at the point that whatever scene needed shooting on a given day – even if it was a late change – he’d be ready. The perfect actor for a producer.
Still, much of the casting process itself, that was going on around him, evaded his attention.
Read more: Bob Marley: One Love review | A searing political thriller weighed down by a biopic
“I wasn’t aware of the worldwide search going on,” he says. “Your part of the audition is just yours. I’ve tested for these huge projects now for many, many years. The first one going back to 2014. And so my understanding is that we’re talking about hundreds if not thousands of people who are taping [themselves] and I guess it’s like a drama school: you know, 4000 people audition, but only 200 of those are ever really going to be considered.”
It helped too that the story was going to primarily settle on Bob Marley at around 33 to 35 years old, in a very particular time.
“We chose to use a very life-changing period of Bob’s life, to let us go into different emotional places in his self and his history,” explains Ziggy Marley. “I was very happy we chose that period of time. His emotional, spiritual journeys. His love of Africa, his decision- making process, the creation of his album Exodus.
Musically speaking, it was very excremental in terms of where reggae was at the time. We go back into history, and come back into the present.”
Kingsley Ben-Adir thus booked the role at the start, when he was deep in work for the Marvel TV show Secret Invasion, in which he plays one of the lead roles. Then he had to hotfoot it over three days from wrapping that show to the set of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie, where he was playing Basketball Ken. Between takes on Barbie, he’d be learning the guitar in advance of the fast-approaching One Love shoot.
Sun is shining
The missing part of the jigsaw here, then, is Lashana Lynch. She took the cover of this very magazine back in March 2020, as she was preparing to hit the screen as Nomi in James Bond feature No Time To Die. That film’s release was delayed to the end of 2021, of course, but Lynch’s career kept building: key roles in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s terrific 2022 feature The Woman King and the big-screen adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda: The Musical demonstrated range and reach.
Even as they were released, the offer to play Rita Marley, Bob’s collaborator and wife, had crossed her desk. It was a special moment.
“Having the opportunity to play Mrs Marley, considering I’m of Jamaican heritage… it felt like my whole career had taught me how to approach this role. Not just the roles that I’ve played. But the lessons I’ve learned as a woman, the spiritual lessons I’ve learned in life, the sensitivity you learn when approaching art with people when collaborating,” she explains to me.
“This has come to me at the right time. This woman who is, you know, made of good stock and strongest bones, but also has a delicacy, and a lightness and a peacefulness that I haven’t been able to explore with other roles.”
I’ve interviewed Lashana Lynch a few times now, and she’s a joy to chat to: thoughtful, and open that the path of her career has now brought her choices she’s keener to pick over. “When you start off in your career, you feel grateful to be in the room, and get an audition.”
When she was offered the Rita Marley role, as much as it being one of her roles of a lifetime, it had to meet criteria that have narrowed over the time.
“The first thing I said to [Reinaldo] when we met is do it right. You need to do it right. Or else the whole of Jamaica is going to come to you and including myself.”
Everyone I speak to on the movie had clear walk-away points, interestingly.
“If there was an inkling that Mrs Marley would have been reduced to the wife or the mother alone, I wouldn’t have had any part in it whatsoever,” Lynch insists. “I wouldn’t have been able to sit authentically within myself on that set if I knew I wasn’t doing her justice. I probably would have walked off a project for the first time if I’d known that was [where it was] going.”
Green put fail-safes for himself in, meanwhile, that if they couldn’t get the right actor, they wouldn’t even make the film. And I put to Ziggy Marley too: what would have happened if, deep in post-production, he suddenly got presented with a cut of the movie that he hated, when it’s pretty gone past the point of no return?
“Even now? I would come back and tell nobody to watch the movie!” He laughs. “Thankfully, it’s not come to that.”
Trenchtown Rock
Authenticity and trust come up lots of times, from different people, during my conversations about the film. A large part of that authenticity was the absolute determination to shoot the movie in Jamaica. Lashana Lynch, for instance, argues that “it would have been impossible, and a complete injustice, to not shoot on the land and capture the vibration of Jamaica in this movie.
“His entire upbringing was there and it’s very much felt when you watch the film, and you feel… you feel the vibes of the island. To try and replicate that in a studio would have been ridiculous.”
No danger of that, though. The production was very visible on the island. Filming in Trench Town, Ben-Adir recalls playing something, and then someone walked past and said that no, you sing it that way.
“And so then you take that on.”
He pauses for a minute, and then continues.
“You’re in Jamaica, you’re on the street, with all these people who knew him, and then his family are all there, kind of watching, and you’re playing the scene, and then they say cut, and then you can go to them and [talk to them about it].”
No slight on it, but we’re pretty sure you don’t get that making Secret Invasion.
“You walk on the streets of Trench Town and you see where Bob grew up. You can sense the humility in the ground that you’re walking on,” adds Reinaldo Marcus Green. “Violence, civil war, you can feel how protective the Jamaican people are of Bob Marley, because he’s a national hero. He’s entrenched in their history and in their future.”
Jamming
There were lots of memorable interludes making the film. “There was a moment in rehearsals,” reflects Lashana Lynch, “when Ziggy got on stage with the rest of the band and started playing. And I was just like, ‘Mother Nature, what the hell do you mean?’ I’m just standing here watching Marley’s son pick up a guitar and play as I’m prepping to play his mother. Wild. Absolutely wild. This was like a different level of alignment that maybe comes once in a lifetime.”
That doesn’t mean it was all plain sailing, though. “You never want to sugar-coat anything. You want to make it complex. You want to make it rich. You want to be as truthful and authentic as possible,” Reinaldo Marcus Green argues. And for Ziggy Marley and Bob’s family’s part, they weren’t afraid to push back if something didn’t feel authentic.
“For me, it was little things,” he explains. “Bob wouldn’t do that. That’s not the way my father was. The whole thing was not to commercialise him, to be authentic him.”
He stops for a second, adding that “there were the moments of concern and attention” during the production. “Not negative,” he adds, “just making sure. It was our responsibility. Reinaldo don’t know my father like I know him. Kingsley doesn’t either, none of them do. It’s our responsibility to pay attention, to try and ensure we represent him as authentically as possible. Those are moments when you have to pay attention and say something.”
Still, the whole experience has clearly been very moving for him. “There are moments in the performance that Kingsley does, and he’s like Bob. Special moments there. Even my brother says it, that you couldn’t tell the difference. For me, I’m affected by Kingsley’s performance. Not the looks, the emotional content that he brings to Bob. I saw Bob in emotional times, I can relate to it.”
One Cup Of Coffee
I start to wrap up with everyone.
Lashana Lynch has said in the past that she’s changed by each role she takes. Unsurprisingly, very much so in this case.
“I’ve been able to harness a stillness that I’ve been looking for in my life as me and as an artist and as a woman through learning about how much we’re able to do everything,” she explains.
“Sometimes this industry can be so chaotic. Creating art can be so taxing at the worst of times. Especially when you add expectations and pressures to it. Through playing Mrs Marley and through channelling the energy of my culture, in a film about my culture, has genuinely given me more peace as a person.”
Kingsley Ben-Adir meanwhile is clearly still in the head-space of Bob Marley, the experience of making the film, and the intensive year he’s gone through. He’s not complaining, he’s just ready for the breathe out moment.
He’s not got long to wait. The film is set for release on 14th February 2024, Valentine’s Day, following a late decision to move it from the end of 2023. That feels right though doesn’t it?, I put to Ziggy Marley.
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“It wasn’t planned that way”, he laughs. “We didn’t have a plan to put out a movie in February 2024, on February 14th!”
Still chuckling, he explains: “That’s why I accept how the universe works. This is what was meant to be! It couldn’t be a more perfect day: I think the world needs it now.”
Given that he opened up by telling me how much he loves his movie night – as does Reinaldo Marcus Green (who seems to out himself to me as someone who sings along at the cinema during our chat!) – I save my last question for Ziggy Marley, and ask him to just sum things up.
“It’s a spiritual story, there’s so much in it. You might have to watch it twice, three times. That’s how I feel about it. A very cool, artistic entertaining way to tell Bob’s story,” he responds.
And what was the last film he watched two or three times? “The Godfather,” he laughs. The man should be a film reviewer…
