The “inspirational” TV show John Boyega called the benchmark for British actors
One of the barriers that some British actors face when making the jump to Hollywood movies, and vice versa for that matter, is that doing a convincing American accent is actually quite difficult. Luckily, for people like John Boyega, it hasn’t been a problem.
Doing accents from across the pond is a tough one, because like most countries, there are very different ways of speaking depending on where in the nation you might be. And we naturally tend to either do one of two things when giving it a go: 1) a kind of ‘Deep South’ Texan drawl, or 2) a New York ‘I’m walkin’ here!’ kind of Goodfellas thing, which doesn’t really fly if you’re an actor trying to play a role of someone from literally anywhere else.
Boyega had no such problems though when he made the jump from an acting school in Hackney to a small sci-fi with Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block in 2011, to about as big as sci-fi can possibly get with 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, one of the most anticipated movies in modern history and an almost unimaginable amount of pressure for a young actor who had never worked in Hollywood before.
But Boyega took his role as converted stormtrooper Finn in his stride, together with a completely convincing American accent. The film, of course, was insanely popular; even with a production budget of more than half a billion dollars, JJ Abrams’ seventh instalment in George Lucas’ franchise brought in almost $2.1bn worldwide at the box office, and Boyega won several award nominations for his performance.
It represented something of a second chance in the US for the actor, because the same year Attack the Block was released, HBO cast the 19-year-old in a pilot called Da Brick, which was to be a series based around the early years of boxing legend Mike Tyson. But it was not picked up in the end, and Boyega instead made a British drama called Junkhearts.
The HBO series would have been a fitting one for him however, because it was one of their most acclaimed pieces of television that inspired him years earlier to dream of making it as a major movie star. Running between 2002 and 2008, The Wire was a crime drama set in Baltimore that primarily used actors who were not at that point household names, including Idris Elba in a breakthrough role.
A young Boyega was amazed to discover that Elba was from London just like he was, Hackney in fact, telling Vanity Fair: “I was like, ‘What?! You’re British?!’ That in itself was inspirational. That was the show you watched if you want to make that transition to the States.”
Aside from another British actor, Dominic West, The Wire also featured the late Michael K Williams as street robber Omar Little, and he and Boyega would eventually appear together in the same film, Breaking in 2022. Also originally known as 892, Boyega played a marine veteran struggling to cope with life outside the military, who ends up trying to rob a bank as Williams tries to talk him out of it.
Later this year, Boyega will start work on Attack the Block 2, but this month saw a first look at his new supernatural horror called The Punishing with Cara Delevingne. Made by the producers of Insidious, it tells the story of a couple heading to Scandinavia to seek a miracle cure for a terminal illness, but paying a heavy price.
