“We look wide and far. You look at the tapes and you see one, and you say ‘eh,’ you see two, and you say ‘eh,’ then you see Kingsley and say ‘hmm,'” Ziggy Marley told CBS about his search to find an actor to play the lead role in Paramount’s “Bob Marley: One Love” biopic.
The reason why he was approving of the British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir to play his father after seeing his taped audition, Ziggy says, was “he held my attention.”
“This is an artistic expression of Bob, so the height, that never matters because he was taller than Bob, but to me, Bob was a giant,” the Tomorrow People artist said.
Ben-Adir said he went into the audition knowing he was significantly taller than Bob Marley.
“I know that he was 5’6″, so I was like, does everyone know this?” He said he made other significant changes ahead of auditioning, like losing 40 pounds for the screen test.
“And it was too much, I felt sick, I wasn’t sleeping, there were a lot of conversations with the family where we were just trying to find Bob’s essence and his spirit in this film. You can’t copy Bob,” Kingsley said.
The actor, who has played roles in the Barbie movie and was Malcom X in “One Night In Miami,” says the most difficult thing for him to learn was the Jamaican patois language which Bob spoke fluently even in his overseas interviews, although he sang most of his songs in English.
“The language, I might as well have been doing a movie in French,” he said. That fact was underscored further during the Grammys when Ben-Adir and Ziggy were part of an improvised moment with host Trevor Noah, where he inquired about Jamaican culture.
Noah said, “I really struggle to understand a deep Jamaican accent. It’s so amazing and so melodic, but tell me what it feels like to see this moment in time portrayed in your father’s life in the movie.” Ziggy responded in his Jamaican accent, saying “you done know,” which elicited awkward laughter from the audience. Trevor pressed further to ask, “is it amazing? How does it feel?”
Ziggy then said, “fire,” and Trevor again asked, “what should we look forward to in the movie?” to which Ziggy answered, “everything cool.”
Noah then asked Kingsley if he would add anything to what Ziggy said, and the trained box office actor said he didn’t understand anything Ziggy said.
The Grammy Award-winning reggae star said his father, Bob Marley, gave him a message before he died in an interview on the Paramount-owned CBS network.
“On your way up, take me up and on for way down, don’t let me down.”
“Bob Marley: One Love” premieres in Los Angeles today February 6 ahead of its global theatre release on February 14.
