Lashana Lynch on becoming Rita Marley for One Love biopic and the future of the Bond franchise
No Time To Die star Lashana Lynch has opened up on whether she’s returning to her role in the series and how she prepared to play Bob Marley’s wife in his new biopic.
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Lashana Lynch says she was introduced to the music of Bob Marley “from the womb”.
The British actor was born in London to Jamaican parents and she recalls the revered reggae pioneer, who rose to global prominence in the ‘60s and ‘70s, helped put the genre on the global map and has sold more than 75 million albums worldwide, as “part of my upbringing in my household and kind of the foundation of who I am as a British-born Jamaican woman”.
Even now, Marley’s seminal albums such as Catch a Fire, Natty Dread and Exodus, as well as his activism and representation of Jamaican culture, remain an integral part of who Lynch is as a person and an artist.
“Being Jamaican and born in the UK, it basically just means that you’re Jamaican and you just happen to be in the UK,” Lynch says over the phone from Budapest, where she is currently filming a remake of The Day Of the Jackal opposite Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne.
“My household was completely Jamaican and it meant that I was able to learn a lot through stories and through music. And Bob’s relation to my way of being, how I like to think, how free I am mentally is partly down to what I was inhaling through his lyrics, which were peaceful and radical and rough and ready and eloquent and poetic.”
So although Lynch has made bigger movies – she played Nomi, who took James Bond’s 007 agent accreditation in Daniel Craig’s swan song No Time To Die, and Captain Marvel’s best friend Maria Rambeau in the Marvel superhero hit of the same name – her role as Rita Marley in Bob Marley: One Love is one that is particularly close to her heart.
The new biopic traces Marley’s rise to fame from his humble beginnings in the Trenchtown slums of Kingston, through his musical career with The Wailers (particularly the turbulent and sometimes violent period recording the 1978 classic, and Time Magazine’s Best Album of the 20th Century, Exodus), right up to his untimely death from a melanoma in 1981, aged just 36.
It also tells the love story between Bob and Rita, who was a singer and songwriter in her own right, as well as a member the I Threes, the backing vocalists for Bob Marley and the Wailers. The pair were married in 1966 and had three children together, two of whom, Ziggy and Cedella are producers of One Love, along with Rita.
The family undertook an epic international casting journey before settling on UK actor Kingsley Ben-Adir (Peaky Blinders, Secret Invasion) to play Bob but equally critical – and arguably more daunting given she was still alive – was finding the right person to play Rita.
Lynch had sought out the already cast Ben-Adir before her audition to talk about the role and life in general – “he’s an incredibly special human and an incredibly special talent” – and once she was cast, pored over Rita’s autobiography No Woman No Cry, forensically examined years of interviews and live performances, and peppered the Marley family and Bob’s contemporaries and colleagues with questions.
But it wasn’t until she visited Rita at her home that everyone concerned realised they were kindred spirits. Rita told Lynch through her oldest daughter Sharon that she had “the energy”, and the actor knew exactly what she meant – and took it as the highest endorsement.
“I believe that if you have a certain energetic way of being and you meet a very similar way of being then that other person will automatically gravitate towards you because they feel something of themselves within you,” says Lynch.
“I feel as though Mrs Marley felt that straight away – there’s something about this woman who was coming to her house who possesses something that she recognises. So I knew that she was comforted by something about me, thankfully, that let her know that she can be at peace with the choice of person and the way in which I would adapt to being her and represent her.”
The more that proudly Jamaican Lynch – the dress she wore to the world premiere of No Time To Die paid homage to country’s flag and she’s spoken of being “hyper-aware of my Blackness from a young age” – researched the lives of Bob and Rita, the more impressed she was by their cultural and musical impact at a time when the music industry was overwhelmingly white and Anglo focused.
“They absolutely together helped break down and further push the barriers that were up for Black Caribbean and African individuals in this art form, who had to create their own space,” she says. “Like many other Black voices in their generation and before their generation they really did carve out a space for themselves whereby they were able to be as free as they wanted, as authentic as they needed to be, but also teach the industry how they should be treated. They were radical in that way in using voice as a political art form but also as a personal expression in order to get their individual messages across, which they did within their music.”
Lynch says she’s not sure what lies in store for the future of the Bond franchise after Daniel Craig’s heroic demise in 2021’s No Time To Die – and she’s excited as anyone else to see what comes next. After an eye-catching, ass-kicking performance, her tenure as Nomi ended in the office of MI6 boss M, raising a glass to the late secret agent, who was blown to smithereens while saving the world on last time. She’s still in touch with Bond producer Barbara Broccoli – although she insists she hasn’t had any conversations about future appearances – and she still can’t make her mind up about who the next Bond should be.
“Everyone asks me and I have really racked my brain and I still don’t know,” she says. “I do know that when they eventually cast someone it will make sense for the 26th film and it will make sense for the franchise. Because a lot has happened since the last one and the audience will be completely surprised I’m sure because we can go anywhere from now, can’t we?”
She’s equally in the dark about her future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After Maria Rambeau was seemingly killed off in WandaVision, Lynch has since popped up twice more in the MCU, once as alternate universe version of Captain Marvel in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and again as new character Binary in a post-credits scene of last year’s The Marvels that drew gasps from the super fans.
“I don’t have a clue – I really don’t,” she says with a laugh. “We watched WandaVision and we were all so sure about what had happened to Maria and now two films later we are watching her exploring universes. I really don’t know. Let’s see what Kevin Feige says.”
Bob Marley: One Love opens in cinemas on Valentine’s Day.
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