“But there was no one but me.” And there was something else too: a gnawing doubt about the intergalactic blockbuster that everyone kept telling him he was so fortunate to be involved with. “At the time I just wanted someone to punish,” he says.
He felt, really, that the harried reality of being an in-demand actor wasn’t all that much fun. He felt that the tyranny of his schedule – the longed-for career opportunities that he had deemed too good to turn down – were disrupting “family time, dating time, all of that”. But he felt strung out and spread too thin. ” He tried to pour his anger and frustration into his work – telling himself, as he carried out a violent murder at the end of each performance of Woyzeck, that he was actually strangling all the things he suddenly couldn’t control in his life. I just overshot it and really took the mickey out of myself by not having enough of a break. There was a lot going on a lot of noise and a negative vibe. “That was a weird time, man,” he says, with a sigh. ‘All of a sudden he had taken off his armour and said, “Here it is.” He shone very brightly’ – Steve McQueen Sometimes you don’t have enough time to play the game.” The rawness, he says, came from looking out into the crowd that day and seeing his own fear and weariness mirrored in the eyes of the other black men present. You need to lay down what it is that’s on your mind. “I feel like, especially as celebrities, we have to talk through this filter of professionalism and emotional intelligence,” he says. He shone very brightly and I rang him a few days after to say thank you.”īoyega himself stresses there was nothing planned or calculated about the speech, its sentiment and delivery was something he had been building towards. You’re thinking, ‘Get your sword up.’ But there’s strength in vulnerability and being naked. “I think of myself as a warrior, because I’m all about battles, but all of a sudden he had just taken off his armour and said, ‘Here it is,’” he tells me, over the phone. But he is almost transgressively vulnerable too, open and tearful and scared in a way that black men – and incredibly famous black men, at that – are rarely seen publicly.įor Steve McQueen, the Oscar-winning director who cast Boyega in Small Axe, this was the most striking aspect of his speech. He is angry, of course, screaming himself as hoarse as a pro-wrestling heel and letting emotion spring from him like a burst pipe. We are a physical representation of our support for Sandra Bland. “We are a physical representation of our support for George Floyd. That is never the case any more.” Voices whoop and spur him on.
“I need you to understand how painful it is to be reminded every day that your race means nothing! That isn’t the case any more.
“I need you guys to understand how painful this shit is,” he tells the mass of raised fists and camera phones, his voice cracking. For almost five minutes, Boyega – sounding every inch the literal son of a preacher – rallies the crowd with a visceral, personal and profane account of what it’s like to be black in the same societies that gave us the barbaric deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Stephen Lawrence and the countless others like them. Though widely shared now (one Twitter clip has been viewed 3.6 million times), what happened next still has the power to quicken the pulse. ‘What I say to Disney is do not market a black character as important and then push them aside’ It is part of the accumulative origin story that, as he faces a Star Wars-free future for the first time in six years and takes a lead role in the BBC’s forthcoming Windrush generation saga Small Axe, is animating his choices both on screen and off it. It is the fact that, alongside the other tales he will tell me about a childhood punctuated by incidents of racism and police profiling – about how when he first went to Nigeria as a ten-year-old he witnessed his uncles slaughtering a cow and fought the shiver down his spine to help heft buckets of still-warm blood – it is offered up to better illuminate exactly what this 28-year-old has been through and what he is made of. No, it is the conduct of its protagonist. But the point of this skilfully relayed, typically Boyega-ish story is not really its dramatic resolution. Of course, it did not come to a physical confrontation and two watery graves in the Atlantic (after 15 minutes or so of noisy back-and-forth, Boyega heard the approaching growl of a police boat, manned by AK-47-toting officers sent by the film’s production staff to look for him history sadly does not record just how quickly the boat’s would-be hostage taker soiled his pants). This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.