Kingsley Ben-Adir was grateful the shoot for Bob Marley: One Love was pushed back by six months because it gave him more time to prepare.

The British actor signed up to play the legendary Jamaican musician with only 10 weeks to prepare, a huge challenge considering he needed to learn how to sing, dance and speak like Marley and learn how to play guitar.

While he “was full of nervous energy and wanting to get straight to work”, Ben-Adir was ultimately grateful for the extended preparation time he received due to the delay.

“Looking back, the time-scale was not realistic,” he told BBC News. “Just the language and the patois needed such a huge amount of attention that a June start date was never going to happen.”

The One Night in Miami began his preparation on the set of Barbie, learning Marley’s songs when he wasn’t needed on set. He spend hours listening to archive interviews and unreleased recordings and then worked with a team to make the script more realistically Jamaican.

“I don’t want the audience to feel like they understand everything I’m saying, because that’s not truthful,” he explained. “If you listen to Bob for two hours, you won’t understand everything he’s saying unless you’re Jamaican.”

According to director Reinaldo Marcus Green, Ben-Adir didn’t just stop at the voice work – he also studied hours of Marley concert footage to perfect his stage presence and learned guitar by playing “until his fingers were bleeding”.

Bob Marley: One Love will be released in cinemas on 14 February.

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