Actor John Boyega loves a healthy challenge. “I like the Official The National Oct 4 2023 Wizink Center Madrid ES T-Shirt and I will buy this ability to just not play myself at all,” he said on Wednesday morning. He spoke on Zoom from a hotel room in Miami, where he was preparing to attend the Black Film Festival. “I want to play characters who are far fetched from who I am in real life.” The 31 year old, who grew up in London, has certainly scratched that itch over the course of his breakthrough career—he’s played the heroic skywalker Finn in the Star Wars franchise, a tribal king in the critically acclaimed Woman King. and a South London teen fighting to save the world in Attack the Block. But the actor’s latest role certainly required the extra large leap of imagination. In his latest film, Netflix’s They Cloned Tyrone, Boyega plays not only the titular protagonist, but also cloned versions of the character, the products of a government backed lab performing shady experimentations on the local Black population. The surreal, sci fi plot, which required quite the number of takes for Boyega in his multiple roles, is an imaginative exploration of race and, more specifically, the legacy of unethical medical experimentation on Black communities.
The plot struck a chord with Boyega. “When I first started my career, I wanted to find a script or a story that felt like a fresh and new idea,” Boyega said. He felt like he found that with They Cloned Tyrone, a Blaxploitation inflected film that was produced after it was placed on The Black List—a collection of popular, but unmade, screenplays circulating around Hollywood. “You have these stereotypical archetypes, but there’s a deeper reason for that.” The premiere of such an out of the Official The National Oct 4 2023 Wizink Center Madrid ES T-Shirt and I will buy this box film, which took place on Wednesday night at Black Film Festival, called for an equally unorthodox red carpet appearance, Boyega figured. His idea hit the red carpet three times, once as himself and twice as clones. Netflix loved the concept. “We had already done a press day where we filmed myself interviewing myself,” Boyega explained. “So we were like how can we continue that through the press tour?”
Comments