John Boyega on true-life thriller Breaking: "It’s very rare to have full footage of the character you’re playing"
John Boyega has starred in some of the biggest science-fiction films of all time in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, but as an actor (and a producer) his film choices have become increasingly urgent in their social commentary.
He mightily impressed for revered filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Steve McQueen in, respectively, Detroit (2017) and the third Small Axe film, Red, White and Blue (2020), and just last year appeared with Viola Davis in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s historical epic The Woman King. All three films are powerful dramas set in the past but relevant to our troubled times.
Boyega’s new film, Breaking, is the true story of how Brian Brown-Easley, an ex-Marine working two jobs and living out of a hotel room, walked into a Wells Fargo banks in Marietta, Georgia clutching a note that read: "I have a bomb". All he wanted was the $892.34 owed to him by the Department of Veterans Affairs – without it, he’d be out on the street – and to draw America’s attention to how veterans were being shafted by the system they’d served.
"The coverage was big – there was a lot of media outside the bank – but I did not have any idea about it, so it was definitely a shock," the actor says of reading writer/director Abi Damaris Corbin’s script.
Inside the new issue of Total Film magazine (opens in new tab), Boyega talks in depth about Breaking and his wider career. Here’s an extract on what he had to say about about Breaking (which played at the Sundance Film Festival under the title 892), which is available on digital in the UK now:
Total Film: How did you find the character of Brian Brown-Easley in Breaking? You seem to inhabit him from the inside out…
John Boyega: The first thing I started off with was talking to Abi [Damaris Corbin,
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