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with Sam Cooke, where Ben-Adir displays Malcolm’s fiery passion for black
liberation without neglecting the paranoia he was burdened with at the time. There

are calmer moments too, where Malcolm quietly hangs back and observes as the

other three men goof off, riding the high of Ali’s win.

Ben-Adir and co-stars Leslie Odom Jr., Eli Goree and Aldis Hodge
Everett Collection Courtesy of Amazon

In one scene, Malcolm is putting his daughter to bed over the phone in a booth

outside the motel and notices his bodyguards surveilling him from the balcony while
two white men (presumably from the government) watch from across the street. “He

put his life on the line in a way that can only sort of be compared to fucking Christ,”
Ben-Adir declares. “He put the fear of God in white America and he’s a bona fide

genius. And I think when you study someone every day from five o'clock in the
morning to the time you go to sleep, you spend as much time as I spent with

Malcolm, there's no way that you can come out the other end of that project and not
feel changed as a human being.”

The inevitable comparisons to Denzel Washington’s titanic performance aren’t lost
on him. Before he was cast, he heard a rumor that some didn’t want to go near the

role because of the pressure. “The actor in me was like, well, I have to do this. This is
an incredible, once in a lifetime opportunity,” Ben-Adir says. “But then there was

another part of me that was like, this could be a really fucking interesting take on
Malcolm that we haven't seen before. So I was sort of riding on those two beliefs.”

Before playing revolutionaries and American presidents, the common threads on
Ben-Adir’s resume were private detectives, federal officers (Noelle, The OA, Peaky