Abdi’s rise to stardom
Somali-born actor had been directing hip-hop videos before responding to a casting
call, though his relative inexperience did feed into his portrayal of a desperate pirate
Until recently, Barkhad Abdi was doing shifts at his brother’s Minnesota mobile-phone shop. Now the 28-year-old has acting plaudits coming out of his ears thanks to his turn as khat-chomping rookie pirate Muse in Captain Phillips, Paul Greengrass’s retelling of the real-life 2009 hijack of the Maersk Alabama off the Somali coast.
When we meet, he’s just snatched the London Critics’ Circle supporting actor gong from the jaws of Jared Leto and Michael Fassbender and, two weeks later, he scoops the same award at the Baftas.
But it’s his Oscars nod that’s proving most difficult to digest. “It is surreal, I would say,” muses Abdi, sitting in his room at the hotel, wearing an oversized suit and Nikes. “That was the one show that I used to watch.” If he’s victorious, it will be a historic win; for what makes his rapid rise all the more remarkable is that Captain Phillips is Abdi’s acting debut.
“There was an open casting call on TV and I went,” says Abdi. He’s managing to look only vaguely weary despite recounting the inauspicious beginnings to his success story for what must be the millionth time. “They asked me easy questions: ‘What’s your name?’, ‘Where were you born?’ and they assigned me to a character and gave me a script.” After the open audition, targeted at Minneapolis’s sizeable Somali community, Abdi’s quietly authoritative presence won him the role of Muse, the pirate ringleader who wrangles with Tom Hanks’s Phillips for control over the hefty American cargo ship. Three of his friends were cast as his cronies. “We auditioned together, we went home and we practised. We loved acting and we really wanted to get this.”
Much has been made of Somali-born Abdi’s previous life as a limousine driver in Minneapolis, where his family settled when he was a teenager; his story touted as that of the most unlikely zero-to-hero American dreamer. But Abdi wasn’t a complete newcomer to the film-making process, previously jobbing as a director on Somali hip-hop videos. “I was working on my own film, too, but it never worked out,” he says sheepishly. “When you work with a great director you realise you are far from being a director.”
It was Greengrass, the British filmmaker behind United 93 and The
Bourne Supremacy, who both guided and relied heavily on Abdi during the Captain Phillips shoot, with the nuances in the novice’s acting carrying much of the story. “(Paul) calmed me down. I remember on the first day, I was so nervous. He told me: ‘Don’t think about the whole movie, just think about today.’”
One bonus of his on-set anxiety was that Abdi could feed it back into the fragile resolve of his character. “(Muse) was feeling exactly the same way as I was feeling. When he got there (to the ship) he doesn’t want to mess up, he doesn’t want to celebrate early.” That wasn’t the only convenient parallel. Despite Hanks being a mentor of sorts to his co-star “He tells me, career-wise, just use it wisely and work your hardest.”
Abdi spends the film engaged in battle with the Hollywood heavyweight, both in terms of the story and screen presence. Greengrass purposely kept the two apart before their first scene in order to harness the real-life dynamic. “We’d never met, that was the hard part. I know who he is, but he doesn’t know who I am. This guy is nobody and this guy is an Oscar winner. So it’s just: ‘Hey, I’m here.’” The need to assert himself over Hanks with the help of nothing more than swagger is what gives Abdi’s performance such an edge.
As a child, Abdi lived in Somalia amid the beginnings of civil unrest. But the forked path in his childhood, which could have resulted in a life not unlike his character’s, apparently had no bearing on his preparation for the role.
He bristles when I ask him if he was expected to bring any of his experiences of Somalian life to his character. “No, we never talked about that,” he says quickly. “It was just all about the script.” — By Rachel Aroesti, Guardian News & Media
DESPERADO: Barkhad Abdi in a still from Captain Phillips.
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