Devon Terrell on playing Barack Obama: He was a flawed young man

HOW does a 24-year-old fresh-faced actor from Perth end up playing the leader of the free world in Netflix’s new movie?

FOR almost eight years, Barack Obama has been the most high-profile person on Earth. Everyone knows what he looks like, the sound of his voice and has an opinion on what kind of man he is.

So how does a 24-year-old fresh-faced actor from Perth end up playing the leader of the free world?

That’s exactly the challenge that fell to Devon Terrell when he was cast in Barry, a film about a young Barack Obama during his undergraduate years at Columbia University in New York that will drop on Netflix on Friday.

Born in California to an African-American father and an Anglo-Indian mother, Terrell’s family moved to Perth when he was five years old. The NIDA graduate grew up in Australia and didn’t follow American politics until Obama was elected in 2008.

Barry is his first major role. A previous pilot he shot for director Steve McQueen was cancelled by HBO before it ever went to air. Off the back of the McQueen project, he landed the Barry gig after one Skype call and one audition. There was something kismet-like about the whole affair.

Terrell tells news.com.au that his own mixed heritage helped him gain insight into Obama’s time as a young man unsure of place in the world.

“I told [director] Vikram [Gandhi] my life story. When I moved to Perth I had to change my accent and had to figure out what was going. I didn’t know anyone who was Anglo-Indian and African-American so I didn’t know if I was Indian or African-American. I was always shapeshifting.

“I was very good at shifting in my life and then I became an actor and it became very seamless, this ‘I know this game of putting on different voices and masks’.

“When I first went to New York again at 21, I was shooting a pilot there and I was taken back. It felt like a different world to me and that’s what Obama went through. I thought when I went to America I was going to have this epiphany of ‘I’m American, this is it’ and it never happened. I came back to Perth and knew I was a Perth boy. Even the Americans can see it — that you’re from Australia.”

Rhapsody in blue.

Terrell says some of the things that happened to Obama in the film happened to him as well in New York, including feeling like an outsider on a neighbourhood basketball court and getting locked out of his apartment on his first night in town.

In Barry, when Obama first arrives in New York, he’s locked out of his apartment and spent the night on the street. Of course, that didn’t really happen, it was a little creative licence on the part of Gandhi and screenwriter Adam Mansbach.

Not much is known about Obama’s time at Columbia. He arrived in New York as a 20-year-old college junior, transferring from Occidental in Los Angeles. He hasn’t spoken extensively about the period but there are a couple of accounts from his classmates, including a New York Times article about a former housemate’s impressions of the young Obama.

The filmmakers and Terrell relied heavily on Obama’s book, Dreams of My Father, a memoir the President wrote when he was in his early 30s and footage of a 30-year-old Obama giving a speech, to capture the essence of a young Obama.

“It wasn’t the Barack we know today,” Terrell says. “It was about the flawed young man we don’t know. I think the film shows this young, awkward but charismatic young man who’s so intelligent but can’t articulate what he’s trying to say.

“It was very much looking at that and asking ‘who’s that kid that wasn’t confident in himself?’. People talk about him being the quiet kid in the corner. Some people didn’t even know he was in their class.”

Terrell admits that it was hard to embody Obama, which included having to learn to be left-handed and working on that specific accent and cadence. All the while ensuring it wasn’t going to come off as mimicry or a Saturday Night Live skit.

He was always a snappy dresser.

Barry also wades into the territory of Obama’s issues with his estranged father, who died in a car accident in Kenya while the future president was studying at Columbia.

But what Barry is most concerned about are issues of race and identity. Throughout the film, Obama clearly feels ungrounded — he doesn’t feel like he belongs with the white students in his class, with his black friends in Harlem, not with his white girlfriend’s well-heeled parents in their exclusive club. He’s being pulled in all directions.

While the film is set in 1981, these questions are still relevant today.

“It’s the perfect movie for the times,” Terrell says. “It just happens to be Barack Obama as the centrepiece. I love the scene in class where a character says ‘why does it always have to be about slavery’ and that same character later brings it up and adds ‘it’s 1981, get over it’.

“They were going through the same things as we are now and we’re still discussing it and we’re discussing equality and gender and all those things. It’s a story about struggle and identity, no matter what race you are. I think everyone wants to identify with something.”

Terrell, especially in the aftermath of the Trump election, believes Obama is underappreciated — he credits him with imbuing in him a thirst for knowledge.

He hopes Barry will form part of Obama’s legacy after he leaves office in just over a month’s time, that the movie is about showing the “human side” to a man that sometimes seems out of reach.

But if he ever gets to meet the President, Terrell’s first question to him will be: “Was I close enough?”

Barry will be available to stream on Netflix on Friday December 16 from 7pm AEDT.

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