Daniel Kaluuya said he was deeply changed by his latest role, taking on the larger-than-life persona of Black Panther trailblazer Fred Hampton, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.
In the new film “Judas and the Black Messiah,” the story centers on Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, his rise in the party and clash with the FBI, and his fatal betrayal by FBI informant William O’Neal.
Kaluuya said that the task of embodying Hammond’s stature was an intense experience.
“It felt heavy,” Kaluuya told USA Today. “It’s a lot of weight to carry. Awakening people that are asleep, you have to deeply understand why they’re asleep and carry that and show compassion to that and move to them from their perspective and awaken them like that. So it’s a lot of thoughts, a lot of things happening. There was a deep, deep, deep, deep weight on me, around me and in me.”
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The actor zealously studied every aspect of Hammond in order to bring him to life. That includes the way the revolutionary spoke. Kaluuya said he even consulted with an opera singer in order to nail his voice.
“To speak different, I have to think different,” he said. There’s a lot of levels to occupy and in someone’s space, spiritually speaking. I met up with an opera singer. And I looked at it from a technical standpoint. What’s this cadence? What’s that cadence? Because it’s a different cadence when he speaks and a different cadence when he does speeches.”
He added, “It was a universe of things that I had to gather in order to get the voice in a place that made me feel confident and clear and allow me to be a vessel.”
Kaluuya said it is hard not to be changed during the process of portraying someone else, however, he doesn’t regret taking on such an exacting role.
“I just know some stuff and that’s me now. You can’t be unchanged by it. You can’t say ‘Oh, I want to be as light as I was in 2016,’ no, you’re not. You’ve seen something,” he said. “It’s only a weight that’s a detriment if you resist it. I just stopped resisting and just accept it. I go, ‘Yeah, yeah, that happened.’ I’m grateful for it, I’m blessed it happened and I move accordingly.”
Kaluuya who is British with Ugandan parents has become a target of backlash on social media for playing a Black American. He spoke on the criticism directed at him in an interview with Variety about the making of the movie.
“I’m a vessel for a spirit that is going through me,” he said. “It’s important for us as Black people across the diaspora to be together. And that’s not to discount what Black Americans feel, what they’ve been through. It’s not about me. It’s about chairman Fred Hampton.”
