![]() ![]() ![]() “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). Here, miles away from a camera or craft services table, the actor found himself involved in the sort of damp-browed, character-defining standoff that is the hallmark of any great thriller. So he laid it out simply: if Boyega wanted him to start the engine again, then he needed to hand over some more money. Whether it was something in Boyega’s demeanour or his Western dress, this enterprising captain, in a country where a degree of cheerful extortion is generally a daily fact of life, scented an opportunity to make some cash. But then, suddenly, out on the water, the boatman cut the engine and turned his attention to Boyega. It was only meant to be a 45-minute journey, scudding slowly out from the port city of Calabar to the production hub in a nearby riverside outpost called Creek Town. Coat by Coach x Jean Michel Basquiat, £1,700. ![]()
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