John got some decent work before Star Wars came calling. I thought: this is what it’s like being in a real film.” Hustle and intrigue Ha ha! I was suddenly in the Ritz Carlton. ’ I was staying at the Coral Sands Motel. So, when Attack the Block became a “real movie”, he suddenly found himself kicked a few rungs up the ladder? He can do publicity for us.’ I thought: why do they want me? They probably want Nick Frost. I was moved from this motel into a nice hotel. I was just staying in a motel and all of a sudden I got word that Attack the Block had US distribution. “When Attack the Block got American distribution I was already in LA. “I didn’t really understand it,” he says. Still, the doors didn’t swing open immediately. “That was my first feature film,” he says. Those plans for university were put on hold. Following a group of south London geezers as they protect their area from invading aliens – good training for future Dr Who Jodie Whittaker – the film was not a smash at the box office, but, after developing a genuine cult following, it found its way towards the casting directors that mattered. In 2011, Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block changed everything. “But nothing ever became a passion enough for me to invest all my time. As with so many budding actors, he felt swept in one direction by an uncontrollable force outside himself. But the interest in film and theatre stuck with him. Especially with my boys, one of who I am still great friends with today. School for me was an absolute joke,” he says. Earlier, he seems to have been distracted by his growing interest in acting and by the everyday pressures of being a teenager. After leaving school, he retook GCSEs in English and maths with a mind to attending university.
I get the sense that he had an up-and-down time with education. School for me was an absolute joke. I was always laughing. I still live about 20 minutes away from where I grew up.”
What do you mean ‘from Peckham to Hollywood’? I don’t like when they do that.” I get mind-boggled when people try to do a ‘rags to riches’ story. My dad taught me just because you’re in an environment where some people – not all people – are a problem that doesn’t mean you have to do the same things. He wouldn’t describe his upbringing as tough? It is true that Boyega’s sister was a contemporary and friend of Damilola Taylor, the young black boy murdered in the locale 17 years ago, but John is exhausted by the efforts to reduce his old manor to a clutch of sensationalist headlines. That part of London is endlessly diverse and resistant to easy caricature.
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John is calmly dismissive of the myth that he fought his way out of the ghetto to become a movie star. John Boyega both produces and stars in Pacific Rim: Uprising. I think that was a journalist trying to write his own version of Star Wars,” he says. There were reports that my dad wanted me to be a minister. He speaks warmly of his father, a Pentecostal minister who has long worked in and about Peckham, but denies the story, now common in many profiles, that dad wanted him to follow in his footsteps. John Boyega was born in 1992 to parents of Nigerian origin. It’s the people around you who change.” Calmly dismissive Where’s the corruption? Is it that shadow over his shoulder? John mimes the act of looking at his own image in a hand-held device. When the money came and the fame came I was looking at myself like this. The wiser movie stars always say that, when fame arrives, the problem is not that you change. Yet, once the ice is broken, he reverts straight to everyday south London vernacular. J J Abrams duly watched and cast him as Finn, the charismatic, deserting stormtrooper, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. His role in the rough-hewn London comedy Attack the Block at the start of the decade made him “one to watch”. On the evidence of these first few seconds, John Boyega hasn’t been much corrupted either. We gab a little about how Reynor doesn’t seem to have changed much since he moved from small Irish films to behemoths such as Transformers. I tentatively note – by way of a home-team ice-breaker – that he recently worked with Jack Reynor on Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit. He briefly glances out the window and then sits straight-backed in a generously sized chair. Or maybe I just think that because he’s surrounded by enough personnel to invade a medium-sized island.Īnyway, he’s arrived.
Dressed entirely in black, he moves with the confidence of a veteran. Everyone’s got a list they need to consult. People with earpieces talk to other people with earpieces in adjacent corridors.
The folk behind the sequel to Guillermo Del Toro’s Robots v Giant Lizards epic have brought us to a grand hotel at the Whitehall end of Westminster. He both produces and stars in Pacific Rim: Uprising.