We caught up with Bob Marley: One Love star Lashana Lynch last week to discuss tackling the role of Rita Marley.
Source: Courtesy / Paramount Pictures
It turns out that this character offered something much deeper for Lynch, who said it wasn’t even really a choice that she join the production.
“I don’t think it was a decision,” Lynch told GlobalGrind. “I think it’s something that just came into spirit to be honest which I’m grateful for. It was a time in my life when I felt, unbeknownst to me, felt ready and felt that I could spiritually and energetically lean into someone who deserves to be represented in in the best way and the most authentic way. I’m of Jamaican descent. I’m a British-born, very proud Jamaican, who tries to rope in my culture into every single moment of my career and to do it so full on and so boldly — it’s a real problem with me that’s all I can say.”
Lashana Lynch Says Rastafarianism Helped Her Harness Her Inner Power
One of our favorite parts about the film is that the Marleys’ Rastafarianism is central to the project, so we were curious if Lynch took anything from it into her life.
“I could say it was the head wraps because if I had hair right now, I think that that would just be me forever,” Lynch told GlobalGrind. “I think that there’s a vibration in the culture that I felt from a very young age. I had Rastafarian children in my class when I was in school and every time I saw their parents, and especially their mothers, I saw an inner power that I didn’t see anywhere else. And I have some powerful women in my family and powerful women in my community, but theirs is just incomparable to anything that I’ve seen before. So throughout this process, I got to harness that. I got to really sit with where that comes from and it’s like an upright line that makes you feel like you’re literally taking energy from your feet and it’s moving through your crown. That’s what I took.”
Source: Chiabella James / Paramount Pictures
Lashana Lynch Talks About The Complexity Of Rita And Bob Marley’s Relationship
While much of Bob Marley: One Love depicts the Marleys relationship in harmony, there is a standout scene that features Bob and Rita arguing in the streets of Paris, outside a party. The argument has a lot to do with Rita standing in her own power, as someone who had a life and a career before becoming Bob Marley’s partner.
“It was vital that we had that scene in there to really show a real relationship,” Lynch told GlobalGrind. “I think sometimes, oftentimes we see relationships on screen or on stage… and you’re like, ‘I’m just getting the highlight reel here.’ It doesn’t mean anything if we’re not seeing the ugly sides of each other to be able to really feel like you know the person. The reason why she is able to go at him in the way that she does in that scene, is because she knows the bones of this man. There’s nothing this man can try and tell her that she doesn’t know already, or that she hasn’t foreseen, so that scene was really important for her to go from the supportive wife, the mother, the one in the band that has a has a lot to say and does a lot for him.”
“There’s only so much you can say in a film, but she did so much in her early days, in her early career,” Lynch continued. “That moment passed, that moment directly after that moment, you get the amount of support that I don’t even know how much she would have had to muster that support. From such a heightened argument that drudges up history, into ‘I’ve got you!’ That is a different type of love. A deep, deep, from your big toe to the top of your head type of love that I’ve not seen before in our culture depicted on screen. It was really, really important and special, vital, necessary and really reminded me of the kind of things that I want to fight for in in cinema and TV and in this industry in general. We got to do the spectrum of black love and I think that was important.”
We love to see it! BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE is currently available to buy or rent on digital as of March 19, 2024 from Paramount Home Entertainment. The film will debut on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray™, and DVD on May 28.
Have you seen Bob Marley: One Love yet? What did you think?
