Before he started covering magazines, playing world leaders such as Obama and Malcolm X, starring in everything from 

to Marvel’s next big TV series and being nominated for a BAFTA, Kingsley Ben-Adir had made a local name for himself for something a little more peculiar than acting.

At nine years old, he received 15 riot policemen and the fire brigade at his home in Kentish Town, after they had been tipped off by terrified locals that a “bird-eating spider” had been let loose and was on the run. The tarantula, named Charlotte, was in fact Ben-Adir’s pet, and once found, was whisked up to the London Zoo, where Ben-Adir’s mother duly collected it the next morning, while her son’s face beamed off the front page of the Camden New Journal.

“I only saw it eat locusts to be fair,” laughs the 35-year-old actor over Zoom, his six-foot-three frame elegantly suited in all-white Brunello Cucinelli finished with a Chopard L.U.C Perpetual Chrono. Fresh from a morning dip in the Mediterranean, he’s sitting on a rooftop in sunny Cannes, having just been awarded the prestigious Trophée Chopard for rising talent alongside Jessie Buckley. Previous recipients include Marion Cotillard and Florence Pugh, who both went on to win Oscars just a couple of years later.

Ben-Adir on the red carpet at the 74th annual Cannes Film Festival, wearing tuxedo, shirt and accessories by Brunello Cucinelli (Photo by Dominique Charriau)


In fact, the star has already been at the centre of serious Oscar buzz himself — after his breakout film 

 in which he plays Malcolm X, became one of the most admired films of 2020. Directed by Regina King and adapted from a play by Kemp Powers (who co-directed Pixar’s 

), it imagines the conversation that might have happened in a Miami hotel room between Cassius Clay, NFL star Jim Brown and soul singer Sam Cooke on the night of Clay’s unexpected victory over heavyweight champion Sonny Liston on 25 February 1964.

“It sort of broke my heart — this man had the weight of the world on his shoulders..." 

Ben-Adir plays the civil rights leader — a year before his assassination — in a strikingly different light to how the charismatic Malcolm X is usually captured on screen. Anxious and self-contained, we see him as a spiritual mentor to Clay just before he changes his name to Muhammad Ali. All the while, X is thinking of renouncing his own faith and starting his own faction of the civil rights movement with Clay as his ally. Over the course of the night, the four public men reveal complicated private selves as they debate compromising the black cause with white approval, and the political pressures that accompany celebrity.

To keep him focussed, Ben-Adir printed off Malcolm X’s quote, “I felt weak, I felt hollow, no one knows the torments I went through” and stuck it on his wall during filming, reading it every day. “Which sort of broke my heart and made me feel like, man this guy had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” Ben-Adir has said of the way he chose to play the leader. “And there must have been times where he felt so alone and was probably suffering in silence.”

Ben-Adir as Malcom X in the acclaimed One Night in Miami


It’s a meticulous performance that saw Ben-Adir nominated for a BAFTA EE Rising Star Award earlier this year, which is all the more impressive considering the North London actor was only given the role by King two weeks before they started filming. He had originally been asked to audition for Clay, but he turned it down — then 34, he felt he was too old to be playing the 22-year-old. But if anything happened to Malcolm X’s part, he told King, she should let him know. She called him up several months later to tell him her original actor had dropped out, and, eight hours of phone grilling later, Ben-Adir had the part. He worked 30 hours with a dialect coach and went on to lose 20 pounds.

Incredibly however, it wasn’t the only part Ben-Adir was juggling in those 14 days. He had also been cast as President Obama in Showtime’s nail-biting series 

 (released on Sky Atlantic last September), based on the former FBI director James Comey’s memoir 

A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership 

about the ‘forest fire’ that was Donald Trump’s first few months of presidency. Filming would need to take place at the same time as filming for One Night in Miami, and so Ben-Adir flew between sets in New Orleans and Toronto. From the way Obama crosses his legs and his thoughtful nod to the former President’s playful, school-boy energy, Ben-Adir’s mannerisms are spot on. With two such important roles under his belt in just one year, and his profile ballooning across the Atlantic, the actor is fast-becoming one of the most promising of his generation. How does he feel?

Ben-Adir plays Barack Obama in 2020&#8217;s The Comey Rule


“The whole thing is kind of mad,” reflects Ben-Adir with a wide-eyed smile that suggests the star is still pinching himself. “I recently wiped my laptop clean of old audition tapes and I had a look at them and I thought, Jesus Christ, at the beginning, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I was just winging it.”

He shakes his head. “I mean, I remember coming back after shooting in LA in 2019, and we were going to go back for reshoots after, and for those couple of months in-between I was thinking, ‘I don’t know if this is for me.’ I didn’t have enough experience to realise that some jobs are going to be better than others. That not everything is going to be in your control. And actually, I still feel so lucky to even be getting jobs. When I was 15, the idea of acting as a job was this completely far-fetched thing. When I think about it, it’s still mad.”

"At the beginning, I really didn't know what I was doing. I was just winging it.”

At 16, with acting still a pipe-dream, Ben-Adir — whose mother is a Trinidadian carer, his father a white British musician — thought he was going to go to university like most of his friends, to study French and English. But he didn’t get the grades at GCSE — a D in French, rather than the A required — and missed his place at Manchester. “I was like shit, fuck, what do I do now?” says Ben-Adir, who ended up working as a learning support mentor for several years, until he got talking to the father of one of the kids he was looking after, who worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company and put him in touch with the right contacts to apply for drama school.

Ben-Adir graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2011 (his alumni include Michaela Coel and Lily James), and picked up his first role on stage just months later: the acclaimed

 by Gillian Slovo, written in swift reaction to the Tottenham riots that had taken place that summer following the death of Mark Duggan. This led to a role as Borachio opposite Mark Rylance (who advised Ben-Adir to never do a scene the same way twice) in 

 at the Old Vic two years later, and his breakthrough TV role as a pathologist in ITV detective drama 

 Similar roles in law enforcement followed: private detective Karim Washington in Netflix’s surreal but addictive fantasy show 

 and head of army intelligence Colonel Ben Younger in series four and five of

There was a worry the actor might be typecast, until Zoë Kravitz cast him as her character’s partner in romantic-comedy drama 

last year. While the show was sadly cancelled after one season, Ben-Adir has praised Kravitz’s script for its focus on a black love story, rather than black trauma.

Now, he is set to star in Marvel’s upcoming TV series 

 alongside Emilia Clarke, Olivia Colman and Samuel L Jackson, coming to Disney next year. Film industry title Deadline recently announced the actor was to play the series’ main villain, but when I ask him about it today, Ben-Adir shuts it right down. “That’s not true.”

“I didn’t say I’m not, but I didn’t say I am. I don’t want to define what it is. I was going to say him but it might not even be a ‘him’.”

The actor is also charmingly vague when discussing other things in the pipeline — yes, some comedy roles might be nice, no, he isn’t interested in returning to the theatre at present — and when it comes to his personal life he is a master of deflection. He manoeuvres questions around to be answered by me, or ushers the conversation on to more neutral territory: his love of wild swimming, and the book he’s reading: 

 by Jung Chang. But his guardedness is less about mistrust and more about his credibility on screen.

“There’s absolutely nothing about celebrity culture that interests me at all,” he has said. “The more you know about me and my personal life, and where I eat and sleep and where I go on holiday, the more difficult I’m making it for you to get into a story where I’m trying to convince you that I’m someone else. It’s in my interest to try and not do that.”

"There’s absolutely nothing about celebrity culture that interests me at all..."

When it comes to politics however, Ben-Adir doesn’t hold back. Last year he waded into the much-publicised debate that has been waged across both sides of the Atlantic about whether a black British actor could truly understand the experience of a black American actor, which kicked off when Samuel L Jackson criticised the casting of Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out and David Oyelowo in Selma. Having played two American icons in one year, Ben-Adir was asked by American interviewers why he wasn’t picking up more roles in Britain.

“Listen, I’ll just keep it mad real with you,” he told the LA Times in the run-up to the Oscars. “There is no career for me in this country. There is no work. I haven’t read a good script with a leading role or a decent solid role coming out of the UK for me in two years, and I went through my emails yesterday to make sure that that was fact. I spent my early 20s waiting to get to 30 so I could come to America and play interesting parts. They send me Gangs of London here, and I’m supposed to get excited? You get a few scenes in a show on ITV and you’re supposed to be grateful?”

I wonder, considering the amount of change and improvement the creative industries have promised following the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, has Ben-Adir noticed any difference in the British scripts coming his way?

“It’s pretty hard to say, because I would really have to sit down with 150 actors across all different ages and casting situations and hear what they’re doing, what their experiences are, and then kind of average it out,” says Ben-Adir. “I only know what’s coming in for me. And what’s coming in for me is directly linked to my experience with Regina [King] and playing Malcolm X. It’s really that simple: I got a break, and that’s why I’m reading a better script. But that’s not a reflection of how well the business is doing in terms of representation.” He pauses to re-calibrate.

“You know, when I’ve answered that question before I’ve regretted my feeling of letting people off the hook, of saying things are getting better. Yeah, there’s more TV, and yeah, right now it feels like there’s a real effort. But we’ll see if it sustains. I’m interested to see if this isn’t just a little phase.”

"I've regretted letting people off the hook, of saying things are getting better..."

Tomorrow, Ben-Adir is on the plane back home to watch the Euros final while self-isolating in his central London flat (sadly he thought it was coming home too). But then he’ll be wild swimming on Hampstead Heath, and sitting in his local cafe reading through scripts while enjoying several months of well-earned rest after a whirlwind year. He leans back on his chair with a contented sigh, then grins.

“How different would it all have been if I’d got an A in French?”

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