Page 523 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

The actor wanted to “look into an examination of his humanity—the father, the loving
husband, the friend.” He read a lot from Dick Gregory and even put the comedian’s
analysis of his good friend up on the wall so he’d never forget it. Gregory described the
“lacerating demagogue” everyone knew, for instance, as “a character that Malcolm
slipped in and out of. It wasn’t all of who he was.”

“He was really a sweet and bashful man. If he could hear us talking now, he’d be so
embarrassed,” Ben-Adir says. “Around this time, he was being pushed out of the Nation
[of Islam], his relationship with Elijah Muhammad was crumbling, and the FBI was
beginning to follow him around. I was just like: This is the way to play Malcolm in this
story.”

He only had 12 days to prepare before filming, and Ben-Adir’s meticulous process
became his entire life for those two weeks. Perhaps his most outlandish—but
productive—practice during this time was paying a friend to come by at 8 a.m. every day
to train. “We just ran text, ran lines, [and] talked about Malcolm. He was doing a bunch
of reading for me, I was reading as much as I could, and then on lunch breaks, we
would go into deep discussions about the politics of the time and just [try] to get as
much in as possible.”

That’s not to mention the physical transformation, which saw Ben-Adir shedding close to
20 pounds. Fortunately, he was already dieting to play Obama. “I’d been cast as Obama
maybe four weeks before, [and] I’d already started to lose weight. I was already fasting
and chain-smoking and trying to drop 20 pounds, really, as quickly as I could. So I was
halfway there.”

About that chain-smoking: A diet of “cigarettes and coffee can be helpful if you have to
do it really quickly,” he says. But Ben-Adir doesn’t necessarily recommend his weight-
loss technique, should others find themselves in a role with similar demands. “If there
was more time, I would have done it in a much healthier way. I think there’s a way to do
it that’s kind to your body, but because there wasn’t that time, it was just really
fasting…. I wouldn’t advise anyone to do that. I’m not suggesting that that is the way to
do it, but with all of the lines that I had to learn and the research that I had to do and the
dialect I had to get, there wasn’t the time to hire a dietitian to help.”

Still, Ben-Adir admits
that the process of
acquiring the required
physique was exciting
for him. “Secretly, I’ve
been waiting for years
for a part where you
get to do a full
transformation,” he
says. “Transformative
acting is something I’ve
always been so keen to
have an opportunity to
do, so I was really
excited. It’s the perfect
opportunity to have a
go at trying to
transform into someone who’s not yourself. Each day you achieve your goals, you get a
buzz from it that really encourages you on to the next day.”