The harrowing assassination attempt on Bob Marley
British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir learned to play guitar, talk and move like Bob Marley for an ambitious biopic that included a notorious episode in the reggae giant’s career.
At 8.30pm on December 3, 1976, seven armed men burst into the two-storey home in Kingston, Jamaica, where Bob Marley and his family were living, and where the reggae star had been rehearsing with his Wailers bandmates ahead of a landmark concert. Within a few horribly surreal minutes, the gunmen shot Marley, his wife Rita, his manager Don Taylor and band assistant Louis Griffiths. Rita was hit in the head and rushed to hospital, while Marley was wounded on the chest and arm.
Somehow, no one died – Rita’s dreadlocks stopped a bullet from penetrating her brain. Just 48 hours after this assassination attempt, and despite the grave risks to their safety, Marley and The Wailers went ahead with their planned Smile Jamaica concert in Kingston. “The people who are trying to make this world worse aren’t taking a day off,” Marley said at the time. “How can I?”
The Smile concert had been designed as unifying exercise at time when feuding political leaders and gang bosses had brought Jamaica to the brink of civil war. Even so, the concert became politicised, rendering the island’s most famous singer-songwriter a vulnerable target.
This notorious episode in the reggae giant’s career is re-created in the new biopic, Bob Marley: One Love, which is co-produced by Rita and two of her children and directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, who was at the helm of the acclaimed movie King Richard, starring Will Smith.
Green’s latest film explores on the big screen for the first time, the personal factors and vulnerabilities that shaped history’s most celebrated reggae artist, from the assassination attempt, to his absentee white father, the childhood taunts he endured because of his mixed-race heritage and his marriage to singer Rita Marley (played by Lashana Lynch).
British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir tackles the central role of Marley and, in a Zoom interview, he tells Review the film aims “to unearth the vulnerability of Bob, his humanity. A personal look at him was what we were all trying to achieve”. The Peaky Blinders and Barbie alumnus – who shares Marley’s fine-featured good looks – reveals: “To find the nuance of that vulnerability in a man like Bob was very tricky … It was about building an interior world that felt truthful to him; that didn’t cross the line in going too far.”
Ben-Adir was cast after an exhaustive international search, and we find his character juggling fruit in his kitchen, with a look of appalled incomprehension on his face, on that December night when a gunman appears as if from nowhere, and pulls the trigger.
The theatre-trained actor tells Review one difficulty of portraying the assassination scenes – and the Smile concert in which Marley defiantly showed the audience his gunshot wounds – was “just imaginatively trying to get underneath what that must have felt like for a guy”. He is talking about the singer-songwriter’s fear, coupled with his determination to prevent the forces of darkness from winning.
The London-based performer “spent hours talking to people who were there at that time; people who heard the shots … You know, Neville Garrick (Marley’s art director), who sadly passed away recently – he was one of Bob’s best friends. And yes, my understanding is that, of course the PTSD that comes as a result of being nearly killed is inevitable. That would be something that they carried for a long time.”
For this thoughtful 37-year-old, portraying reggae’s king of cool has been a highwire act that required the longest preparation he has undertaken for any role. “Oh my God. Yeah,” is how he replies when asked whether he had to learn to sing, dance, play guitar, speak in a Jamaican patois – and acquire Marley’s signature “locs”.
Mastering the reggae pioneer’s patois – which is spoken on screen by most of the cast – involved months of training, including painstakingly transcribing his recorded interviews. “Cedella (one of Marley’s daughters and a producer of the film) very kindly sent me this file of many, many, unreleased interviews. Over the years from 1968, all the way through to 1981,” he says, adding that Jamaican patois is a language in its own right.
The actor says that as soon as the One Love offer was confirmed, he didn’t wait for the studio, Paramount, to arrange guitar or singing lessons. Clearly a self-starter, “I just got myself a guitar. And I found a teacher on YouTube and just started learning the basics.”
Green says he cast Ben-Adir because of the way he captured Marley’s “essence”. “We searched every corner of the world,” says the director. “What you’re looking for is someone to embody Bob Marley … You can’t bring him back. But you can bring his essence back. What Kingsley did was interpret Bob. An actor acting, not mimicking. It was masterful.” Green also says the British actor lost “a ton” of weight to play the wiry singer, whose dance moves were often trancelike.
As he immersed himself in Marley’s life, rock-inflected reggae rhythms and speech patterns, Ben-Adir was not just beholden to the vision of Green but also had to win the approval of the Marley family. As the film’s production notes state: “Bob Marley: One Love is a movie not made with the blessing of the Marley family, but by the actual family themselves. Producing are two of Bob’s children – Ziggy and Cedella Marley – and the female artist and icon who was so instrumental to what her husband achieved in his 36 years on the planet, his widow, Rita.”
Another of Bob’s sons, eight-time Grammy Award winner Stephen Marley is the movie’s music supervisor. The film’s live concert scenes feature Marley’s original tracks with the cast lip-synching and playing along, while some of the jamming scenes feature the movie band’s voices.
Music and film producer Ziggy Marley – the eldest son of Bob and Rita and also an eight-time Grammy winner – says Ben-Adir was “the best (of everyone we saw), simple. But it was also about, ‘Who can hold this?’ Because it’s a very heavy burden. When I met Kingsley, I knew this was a man who could. He had the right spirit, energy, ability, respect and commitment.”
The family was closely involved throughout the shoot and the vast majority of the cast is Jamaican. “We had descendants of The Wailers who were playing their parents. Ninety eight per cent of the cast was Jamaicans playing Jamaicans,” says Ben-Adir. (The last surviving member of The Wailers, bassist Aston Barrett, died this month, aged 77.)
Marley’s belief in Rastafarianism is also explored and according to Ziggy, “this film was baptised by the Nyabinghi ceremony on April 18, 2023. It’s a spiritual thing. You couldn’t have a Bob Marley movie without that spiritual element.”
Playing opposite Ben-Adir in the film is No Time To Die star Lynch, who portrays Rita, a deeply spiritual Rastafari woman who starts dating the lonely Marley as a teenager in Jamaica. She is a backing singer who gives up career opportunities for her husband and she must later contend with his womanising, yet their bond outlasted such tensions (Marley reportedly had 11 acknowledged children by several mothers).
How did Ben-Adir find working with the Bond star? “I love her,” he says without a trace of self-consciousness. “We met early on. We worked on the relationship (between Rita and Bob) and developed it over many months. Our intention was to really find that dignity in the love and the connection between them in a really subtle way.”
He was initially reluctant to put his hand up to play Marley. “I was hesitant when the audition or the idea of putting myself forward, when that conversation came up. I didn’t really know anything about the project other than that a film about Bob was in the works.” Finding out the singer’s family were driving the film “gave me an enthusiasm to have a go”.
Preparing for his role included a trip to the football with Ziggy, as Marley had been a soccer fanatic. Says the actor: “I was lucky, because I had the family who were vouching for me and I had access to so many people who loved, who knew Bob personally. So in terms of finding more about the personal side of him – the private Bob, the father, the family man – some of the struggles and the immense pressure that he was under, it was invaluable.”
Another focus of the film is the making of the Exodus album in London, in the months following the gun attack. In 1999, Time Magazine would anoint Exodus as the 20th century’s best album. Released in 1977, it included luminous tracks such as Jamming, Three Little Birds, and the One Love / People Get Ready medley.
“For me now, it’s the great album,” says Ben-Adir. “It’s my favourite album. What’s interesting to me from an acting point of view is that four, five, six weeks after this assassination attempt, what came out of it was this really intensive creative period where Bob was in a kind of exile in London … The complex trauma of the attempted assassination and the turmoil in Jamaica caused this really intensive music creation.
“For me, it was always about looking into the human aspect of that – the lengths Bob went to, to create the music that we get to enjoy today and how much it cost him.” (The gunmen involved in the assassination attempt were convicted and executed.)
The film revisits another defining moment in Marley’s career – his triumphant return to Jamaica in 1978 to play the One Love Peace Concert, when he called on to the stage the bitterly opposed leaders of the nation’s two main political parties, and joined their hands together above his head. It was a powerful gesture of peace that reverberated around the world.
A graduate of London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Ben-Adir started preparing for this role even while working on the candy-pink sets of Barbie as a Ken, by transcribing Marley interviews and practising basic guitar chords. He says he enjoyed working on the Barbie blockbuster “in a big way” but doesn’t elaborate. Last year, he also filmed Marvel’s Secret Invasion miniseries for Disney+, performing opposite Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn as Gravik, a rebel who wants to rule Earth.
From 2017 to 2019, he played Colonel Ben Younger, a British intelligence officer on the BBC/Netflix period crime series Peaky Blinders, even though “there was no way that I thought I was gonna get it, just because of the period and who the character was. So when it (the part) came through, I remember the feeling of being like … This is kind of nuts.” He says this with a kind of hushed amazement.
“By the time I came in (for seasons four and five), it was a huge hit. And people loved it. And I love the show … It just felt like an amazing thing to be a part of in any capacity.”
On Peaky Blinders, he worked alongside Cillian Murphy, and that actor’s signature pitiless blue gaze. I mention that I once interviewed the Irish performer – who has been nominated for a 2024 best actor Oscar for his role in Oppenheimer – and found him to be a very intense personality. “No, I feel the opposite,” says Ben-Adir. “He’s very, very supportive towards all the actors he works with. Towards me he was particularly supportive. I remember, it took me a little while to find my rhythm with him. I was gutted when I got killed, because I would have loved to have worked with them a bit more.”
Speaking of death, it comes as a jolt to be reminded that Marley died from melanoma in 1981, aged just 36, because his music has since become so ubiquitous. Legend, a compilation album released three years after his death, became the biggest selling reggae album of all time, and he was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
Ben-Adir says: “I turned 36 the week before we started shooting. So, you know, I don’t know why it (Marley’s premature death) just kind of made me feel like I was …” His voice trails away and a look of sadness passes across his open, sincere face.
I put it to this talented thirty-something that he is making a habit of playing legends. He played Malcolm X in the 2020 film, One Night in Miami directed by Regina King, and Barack Obama in the 2020 miniseries, The Comey Rule. (“In a very small capacity, I played him,” he clarifies).
He agrees it can be daunting to portray famous people who are fixed in the public mind in a particular way. “There are moments where it will dawn on you that Malcolm and Bob and Barack – these are people who mean so much to so many people.” But ultimately, he says, playing a real-life icon is about having enough time to prepare properly and “to do my version” of a role.
Once the work gets under way, “I would say the fear or the nerves around it are no different to just playing a part to do it justice, or to attach to the director’s vision. With Bob, everyone thinks they know him and everyone loves him ... He’s pretty unique in that way.”
The actor rejects any suggestion the family’s intimate involvement with the film, and sense of ownership of Marley’s story, could have been problematic for those reanimating the behind-the-scenes life of the man who took reggae mainstream. “Not in our movie, it was one love,” he says firmly. “And we all worked together, because we were all on the same page. It was about bringing Bob’s human side to the screen.”
Bob Marley: One Love is in cinemas from February 14.
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