Sometimes, being an actor sounds a lot like being in one of those performance-anxiety nightmares where you’re expected to perform some impossible task like landing a plane or executing an Olympic gymnastic routine. Last year, Chadwick Boseman found himself at the former residence of James Brown, with Brown’s extended family gathered to judge his impersonation of the Godfather of Soul. They wanted to hear him talk like Brown, sing like Brown, dance like Brown. “Let me see you do the mashed potato! Lemme see this! Lemme see that! And that!” Boseman laughs, recalling that nerve-racking day. “It was so intimidating to walk into his house, to have his family saying it.’” So did he oblige? “I didn’t. I said, ‘I’m not gonna let you put me on the spot like that. You’ll have to wait and see.’” As it turned out, the family ended up telling stories and showing Boseman their own impersonations of James Brown.
That wasn’t the only test Boseman had to pass on the way to securing the lead role in Get On Up – a movie that’s less a straight biopic of James Brown than a haphazard flick through the overstuffed scrapbook of his life. Even by showbiz standards, Brown is a dauntingly distinctive character. There are so many things to get wrong: not just the mashed potato but the voice, the hair, the teeth, the outfits. Added to which, the variables changed from decade to decade as Brown took on new personas: Mr Dynamite, Soul Brother Number One, The Original Disco Man, PCP-raddled recluse brandishing a shotgun and demanding to know who just used his private toilet. As challenging roles go, as Brown himself would say, it’s a mutha.
According to Tate Taylor, director of Get On Up, the first thing he needed to see was Boseman playing Brown in his 60s. That was the achilles heel of the whole project, says Taylor. “I thought, ‘If this isn’t perfect, we will fail, and the whole tone will be wrecked.’ So I said, ‘I need the best fucking actor I can find.’” There had been pressure on Taylor to cast a famous rapper “and all the usual stunt crap,” he says, but Boseman was his only choice for the role. “I just had this suspicion,” Taylor says. “And he nailed it.”
Few others would have spotted that potential. For one thing, the 37-year-old actor bears very little resemblance to Brown, a fact that’s even more apparent now he’s out of the wigs and jumpsuits, and ranged across a sofa in a London hotel suite. He’s a good six inches taller than Brown, athletic, courteous, relaxed, and his speech is completely intelligible. He was a relative unknown, his only previous high-profile role being baseball legend Jackie Robinson in the movie 42. But that’s very likely to change. Boseman’s performance in Get On Up is already being talked about as one of the year’s best.
In terms of technical impersonation, he hits all the right notes (even if he doesn’t actually do most of the singing – the movie uses Brown’s live recordings for that), but Boseman goes far beyond that – no mean feat with a character as tortured, contradictory and essentially unfathomable as Brown. “Nothing he does smacks of mimicry,” raved Variety. “He feels Brown from the inside out, the way Brown felt his own distinctive rhythms.” It’s turned out to be less an anxiety nightmare than a dream-come-true.
Having said that, Boseman didn’t want the role initially. He remembers receiving the Get On Up script among a pile of others and not even reading it. “I just didn’t think there was any point in trying,” he says. “I was like, ‘What’s next? Gimme something else.’ He’s too big an icon, and I’d just played one [in 42]. And in my mind, I didn’t know how you would even approach those dance moves.”
The mashed potato was just the start. Brown’s repertoire of dance steps defies labelling: there were the proto-moonwalk glides, the one-footed cross-stage shuffles, the athletic leaps down into the splits, then scissoring up into a pirouette. The theatrical collapses to the knees and returns to the mic during Please, Please, Please. “I can definitely dance, but pedestrian dancing,” says Boseman. “That’s professional dancing. Just the grooves when he’s at the microphone and directing the band are much more difficult than anybody would ever imagine. Everything is doing something: the head, the shoulders, the legs. And it depends on what song it is too, because he changes it up. That’s hard! He makes it look easy.”
Boseman only had six weeks to learn it all. He started out doing five hours’ dance training a day with an instructor, then pushed it up to eight. Even off-set, he was dancing all the time, he says. “The thing is, when something clicks, it makes you want to keep doing it. I would be with friends, just talking, and I’d still be moving. They’d be like, ‘What you doing?’”
On set, Boseman stayed in character, too, he explains. “If we took a break and you sat beside me to eat, you’d be eating with James Brown. Till I went home at night, it was JB.” It wasn’t a crazy method-acting thing, Taylor explains; more to do with the effort of imitating Brown’s unique gravelly, slurring southern drawl. “Chad had to retrain his vocal cords and hold them in a different position in his throat, so between scenes he had to keep them where they were. It was fun. We never saw Chad. We called him ‘Mr Brown’. It just felt natural.”
Get On Up’s non-linear approach is partly an acknowledgement that Brown’s biography is simply too big to cover in one movie. His life story is so packed with recordings, performances, incidents and encounters, it’s almost impossible to catalogue.
Taken as a whole, Brown’s life is almost unbelievable, not just in its breadth but in its inconsistency. He recorded black-power anthem Say It Loud (I’m Black And I’m Proud), then performed it at Richard Nixon’s inauguration. His friends included Al Sharpton and Ray Charles, but also Ronald Reagan and segregationist senator Strom Thurmond. He would fire band members for using drugs, yet came to abuse them himself – hence the shotgun incident.
Get On Up at least hints at the demons that plagued him – extreme poverty, abandonment by his parents, growing up in brothels and juvenile prisons in the Jim Crow south – and suggests how they later manifested themselves in the form of abusive, often violent relationships with his band members, wives and lovers. One of the hardest parts of Taylor and Boseman’s job was discussing with Brown’s ex-wife DeeDee exactly how she wanted her domestic assault to be portrayed in the movie. Rather than being protective of Brown’s reputation, his family were open to even more of his dark sides being shown, says Boseman. “But there’s still love. There was a lot of really intimate nostalgia and love for him. This is even true of band members. He was like a father figure to them – and everybody has issues with their father to a certain degree. But when he’s gone …”
Boseman also grew up in a big extended family in South Carolina, just three hours from Brown’s base, albeit in markedly happier circumstances. The son of a nurse and an upholsterer, he claims to have 42 first cousins. He majored in directing at Washington DC’s Howard University. Acting only happened by accident when he decided to take a theatre course, which included a week at Balliol college, Oxford. “I was really only studying it to know what the actor was doing, not really wanting to be up there myself, so it was a surprise to realise I’d caught the acting bug.” But success pushed him in the direction of Los Angeles, where he moved in 2008.
Not that he’s ditched plan A. He has written stage plays and directed short films, and recently sold a thriller script to Universal, which he’s working on now (he’s not allowed to say what it’s about). The plan is still to direct as well, he says. “There’ll be a time. And maybe it’ll be easier if you’re a successful actor.”
On that front, his star is still very much in the ascendant. Last month, after much casting speculation, he was announced as Marvel’s Black Panther, the first black superhero in comics and the first superhero of colour to get their own movie, and an all-round super-cool badass of a character. He’ll make his entrance next year in Captain America 3 with a solo movie in 2017 (again, he’s not allowed to talk about it). After Jackie Robinson and James Brown, that’s a hat trick of African-American icons. He’s not quite known as the hardest-working man in the movie business yet, but it sounds like it’s only a matter of time.
• Get On Up is released in the UK on Friday 21 November
