Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch on the Depiction of Bob and Rita Marley’s Complicated Marriage in ‘Bob Marley: One Love’

Directed by Renaldo Marcus Green, Bob Marley: One Love takes on the heavy task of telling the story of one of the greatest musicians in the history of popular music. This man brought an entire sound (reggae) to the masses. In my experience, many young people come to Bob Marley in college and focus on his laid-back songs as they smoke a joint, but Marley was a true rebel and revolutionary. There is a scene in One Love that shows Marley and his band discovering The Clash in London in the ‘70s and seeing the thematic parallels between his music and theirs (of note: The Clash would later incorporate reggae into their music, paying tribute to Bob Marley and the Wailers). Bob Marley and the Wailers were every bit as punk in spirit as The Clash were, proving that “punk” isn’t just a sound but a “take no shit” perspective (see Public Enemy for another example of this ethos).

Standing behind Bob was his wife, Rita, like a brace to his backbone. She was an extraordinary person in her own right, who often put her own opportunities in the music industry to the side to support Bob’s music and message as both moral support and as a part of the band, providing the harmonies on so many great Marely songs with her trio, the I Threes. Bob and Rita’s relationship was a complicated one. Bob would often seek “company” outside of their marriage, but Rita saw a bigger picture through her personal pain and remained steadfast in her support.

In playing Bob and Rita, Kingsley Ben-Adir (who has now played Malcolm X in One Night in Miami and now Bob Marley) and Lashana Lynch do not shy away from the complications and contradictions of the marriage they are portraying. Both greatly honor the extraordinary subjects they play and can take much credit for making Bob Marley: One Love a huge international success. In our conversation, we discussed how they prepped for their parts, the responsibility of playing legends and being true to Bob and Rita’s relationship.

The Contending: I used to run a record store far too many years ago, and I used to listen to many Bob and Black Uhuru, Aswad, and other reggae bands, but Bob was the mountaintop of reggae. Kingsley, you’ve had this experience fairly recently; there’s a responsibility to play people who actually existed in playing icons. Did it occur to both of you that we’re in for it here? People will have expectations. 

Kingsley Ben-Adir: Yes, in one way, but in another way, I decided to do it as well, so you’re not forced into doing anything. It’s scary, and it’s pressured, but you want to do it as well. There’s a motivation and ambition and curiosity and wanting to be challenged. Pressure like that is also such a privilege and can be exhilarating, and you have to walk on the edge of dangerous and risky to get that experience–the bigger the reward, in a way. But I think there are eyes on Bob. Everyone has an idea of him. I also felt at the beginning that I didn’t know how this would work. With Malcolm, I wanted to play him; I was fighting to get in that room. Someone else was cast at the beginning, and I said if anything happens and they pull out or whatever, I’m in. I thought I could do it, I wanted to do it, but with Bob, it wasn’t like that. I felt very unsure and needed to go through a whole process to find him. 

Lashana Lynch: Mine’s slightly different because some people don’t know, even to this day, that Bob was married and spiritually is still married to Rita. So my only pressure was the pressure I put on myself, which, as an artist, you just come on board any project, and you want to nail it. When the person will be the example, the education for the audience, learning who this person is in their existence, you do want to uphold this protection, if you like, of the person and ensure that the audience is taking away things that you actually intended for the character to have. That came with a lot of self-speak, which is to say, it’s not your responsibility to take on other people’s thoughts and feelings of who this person should be. Once I was able to get through that, then every day at work on set, it’s just a person that you’re playing. Both of these people are people first and artists second, even though the two are very much intertwined. They’re just members of the earth who have to walk it emotionally and spiritually and work through things and overcome trauma and all of the rest. It’s our job to dive into that safely and calmly and actually try and have an enjoyable experience instead of a pressurized experience.

The Contending: Something I really admired about the film is that it shows the complications in Bob and Rita’s marriage, particularly with Bob’s infidelities, and the challenge of having a marriage where Bob has this reputation as this holy almost prophet-like distinction—a lot of which is earned. But there were real challenges in their marriage, and I  appreciated that both of you got to play through those challenges. 

Lashana Lynch: A marriage, a relationship, a connection with anyone will come with its challenges. And I think that it would be doing the story that we told a disservice if we didn’t tap into what relationships and marriages can display in oneself, whether they take you in a direction that you didn’t anticipate or if it’s the chance for you to find more fruitful things in your life, or to really discover that there’s maybe ugly parts of yourself that you really need to address. I think that it’s really important to take it away from these two massive icons who had some troubles and had to work through them slowly and how terrible that must have been. That’s everybody. Everybody who’s been in a relationship can watch this film and think ah, yes, I might have been through a bit of that or have a friend who’s been through that. And it humanizes the artist slightly, which we don’t often get to do with people in the limelight like Bob Marley; people just learning who he is from this film, that he was actually a human first. So to discuss marriage and what that brings, and what it brings out in these two, it was important to keep it as that’s real life and that’s what happens. It doesn’t separate them from anyone else’s challenges in their own relationships. 

The Contending: Everybody who knows Bob Marley on the margins thinks of him as a saintly character, which is a little unfair. Look at David in the Bible. Some refer to David on this perfect level, but he’s also a man who sent out his best friend to go to war so that he might hopefully die and he could take the guy’s wife from him. Granted, Bob wasn’t on that level of deviousness, but showing that human side of Bob, the part that we take away from the iconography and we get away from that, and showing him being angry and upset and the scene where he goes after his tour manager, those are things that I don’t think that a lot of people would have expected. Kingsley, how did you feel when you got to show those parts of Bob that weren’t pleasant?

Kingsley Ben-Adir: Needed them. That scene in particular, and the album cover scenes. Putting Bob in a Hollywood movie is a really particular thing because how he responds within that is so unique. It’s very difficult to put Bob in a final scene where he’s crying; he doesn’t have an Oscar speech. He’s not that guy. So the conversation with Ziggy, Neville, Ray, and everyone was like, how do you find that authenticity within a story structure that typically asks for those things? With the suppressed rage and the impulse towards violence, you need a touch of it because all of these great people who lived are great because they were complex. We’re all capable of experiencing all feelings. That’s what makes us all connected and human. And yes, Bob could be happy, Bob could be sad, Bob could be angry, Bob could be everything. We needed those moments, and they came from a true part of history. As an actor, you don’t want to hide away from that stuff. That stuff’s the gold you want, but also, I completely understand not wanting to delve into the gossip and do all of that. That wasn’t the film. 

The Contending: I admired that the Jamaican accents were not eased down to make it easier for the viewing public. It makes you pay attention to what they’re saying if that differs from a sound your ear is tuned to. How hard was it for the both of you to master those accents? 

Lashana Lynch: My parents were born and bred in Jamaica. I was raised in a Jamaican household. So, I have my family’s version of Patois in my mouth and in my body. I then had to dive into what it meant to speak in this accent in the era we were playing in, which is very foreign to me, having not been there, and also adopting a very clean-cut, elegant, sweet version of Patois of Jamaican English actually, not Patois, because Rita did not speak in Patois much publicly and some of the scenes that we have are either her speaking in front of people or she’s speaking with Bob, which is a more tender approach to the way that she speaks. So my work was taking away the Patois in my head and actually lending the Jamaican accent that I know and that I learned in just English form, which I found quite challenging at points because you feel like you can rely on what you have, but actually your brain is being told that’s not what you should do here.

It needs to be something else that is a little more clipped. Whereas Kingsley and other characters, whether they were Jamaican or from elsewhere, were diving straight into Patois. So I was hearing Patois everywhere, but not able to bounce off of them. That was quite an interesting challenge for me, which at points made me question if I could even do a Jamaican accent, even though I’m Jamaican. I like that I wasn’t able to just rely on what I knew because, as an actor, that makes you complacent, and it means that you’re not diving into an uncomfortability that actually helps you find rich new things. So, I enjoyed finding a different era of Jamaica in my mouth that felt foreign and eventually became home. 

Kingsley Ben-Adir: It was the ongoing thing of my life. I was terrified by it. Cedella (Bob and Rita’s daughter) sent me a bunch of interviews of Bob that only the family have, and I didn’t know they were coming. There were hours and hours and hours of Bob talking over the years in all different contexts and settings. So I just started listening to them and realized that I didn’t understand a lot of what he was saying. And so the process began of translating, transcribing, learning them. At some point, I think it was maybe eight weeks before we started filming I realized that a kind of improvisational fluency wasn’t going to happen. It just wasn’t the time. You need to live in Jamaica. Then I was convinced it’s more like a language than a dialect with Bob. So we had a huge team who worked on it. My script was translated into a language called Cassidy, which is a phonetic language that was developed in Jamaica to write Patois in its own language. And so I learned how to read that.

There were specific sounds and words. So my script was written out in Cassidy, and what it meant was that I could read it for the sounds and the mouth shape. I had to learn that, and then I would stay set within a structure, and I would only improvise things that I’d heard Bob say and that we’d also translated into Cassidy. So all of those interviews that we transcribed into Patois eventually got transcribed into Cassidy, and then I had a book. I had a bible of Bob-speak that was well over a hundred pages. And I just kept learning that as we went through and never stopped. Then, you end up having this encyclopedic knowledge of the way Bob expresses himself and just the nuances of the language. I would never improvise outside of that structure because you will improvise wrong. Or you end up practicing mistakes, and then the mistakes get set. To begin with, it felt a little bit intense or that I was being guarded. But, by the end, I think everyone knew that was the way to go because it forced us all to be really specific when it came to how Bob spoke. It was ongoing. 

The Contending: There’s a fascinating dichotomy in Bob Marley, where he was a revolutionary musician who also wrote extraordinary love songs, and sometimes the two cross paths. Some people know “Three Little Birds” or “Turn Your Lights Down Low,” which I think is almost a Motown song set in a different sound, but he was also an apolitical revolutionary. And Rita provided his backbone so he could go out there and have that sort of freedom. One could not exist without the other, not in the same way anyway. 

Kingsley Ben-Adir: I think you’re right. 

Lashana Lynch: I like that thinking because I think it’s very easy to see where an artist like Bob lands, meet him at his best, at his height, with the best albums and his most influential music, and sit with him there instead of diving beneath the surface and questioning what it was that brought him to even write in that way—what experience he’s had and the childhood he’s had, how he’s been uplifted and upheld by members of his household, namely Rita, who saw that he needed the structure and needed a different level of energetic and spiritual support that would enable him to be his best self for the world and to continue spreading their message that was their life’s work.

Reading the script and then listening to Mrs. Marley speak, it’s so beautiful to know she did it selflessly. Obviously, that was her husband, and that’s her family, and they have a deep spiritual bond. But it’s really beautiful that there was no “I did that. That was because of me.” She just gave and gave. I don’t know how she even had it in her to give as much as she did and remain so light, powerful, and poised. She had a special effect on Bob, I think, that no matter what his actions or behaviors or what thoughts were on how he went about his life, I think he always came back to, this woman has me; she has me in a different way that lets me see myself and lets me continue reflecting on who I am and what I’m going to be for this world eventually so that he can stay in that. It’s a really cool protection that she had because without having someone like her…I don’t know. 

Kingsley Ben-Adir: People lose themselves when they don’t have that protection and sense of safety and love. I don’t have children, but the sharing children and the children being present throughout this as well, as they are in the film, they’re mentioned. We meet them at the beginning, and at the end, they tie up the bow of family and community, which was one of the most important things about this film: Bob’s love of family, love of community, love of self, wherever you’re at with that, love of the band, love of music, love of football, love of everything. The theme of love is what is working on so many levels.