Page 521 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

His insistence on putting in the work marks a reverence for character-building that Ben-
Adir charts back to performances he saw and plays he read in his youth, ones that later
inspired him to reconsider the stress he felt as a younger actor.

“Jeffrey Wright is always the first person who comes to mind,” he says. “He’s one of the
few people where, every time I watch him, there’s this truth and internal dignity.
Everything he does is always so different and so connected; he’s someone who I’m
always excited to find out what they’re doing next and what they’re in.” Alongside
Wright, Ben-Adir praises Anthony Hopkins and Robin Williams, and recounts being
reluctantly dragged by his father to see Jim Sheridan’s 2002 film “In America” only to
have his eyes “filled with water” by the end.

“I think all of these experiences—you don’t really know what’s going on at the time, but
they’re all building in you. They’re building blocks to the passion,” he says. That high he
felt watching Paddy Considine and Samantha Morton onscreen is what he hopes to
capture in his own roles, and it’s what led him to training at the Guildhall School of
Music & Drama at age 21.

“I applied when I was working, and I got into a bunch of schools, so that’s really how it
started,” he says. “One thing just led to the next, and I got into Guildhall and did three
years training there, and then just took one step at a time.”

Guildhall also gifted him with a
level-headedness about what
success can look like in this
industry. He recalls a “big
speech” from voice coach and
professor Patsy Rodenburg in his
last week there. “She said that
the first five years of your career,
for those of you who are lucky
enough to have a career for the
first five years coming out of this
building, is just practice. She said
[to] use them to learn, [and that]
after 10, that’s when everything
will really start kicking in.”

Fast-forward to 2020: Ben-Adir has just hit his 10-year mark, and everything is indeed
sliding into place. “When you’re starting off, you’re so eager for everything to happen
straight away, to get these big lead parts straight away,” he posits. “It didn’t really
happen for me like that; it’s taken a bit more time, and I feel like Malcolm came exactly
at the right time, when I was ready.”

Once the role was his, Ben-Adir promptly began to put in the work required to tackle the
historic figure, refusing to let Denzel Washington’s iconic, Oscar-nominated 1992
performance intimidate him. “There was this really awesome opportunity to play
Malcolm in a way that I felt that we might not have seen before. Because it is just four
men in a room speaking, so much of the arc of the movie is this huge emotional
undercurrent that Malcolm is going through. Trying to map out that journey with Malcolm
just required such a full and deep concentration.”