Malachi Kirby: ‘Playing Kunta Kinte in Roots reboot allowed me to find my own roots’

The London actor talks his latest TV role, meeting Danny Dyer, and his intense love of apple pie
Malachi Kirby photographed at the Haymarket Hotel
Matt Writtle
Ellen E. Jones9 February 2017

One day, about five years ago, Malachi Kirby’s mother handed him a DVD boxset.

“She wanted me to watch it. I didn’t know why, she’s never done that with anything else before, or to this day.”

The DVD was Roots, the seismic 1977 TV saga about the lives of several generations of enslaved African Americans, descending from Kunta Kinte (the young Kunta was played by LeVar Burton, later known to Star Trek fans as Geordi La Forge). At that point in his life Kirby, like many young Britons, had some awareness of the transatlantic slave trade but had never really studied it.

“It blew my mind,” he says of that first viewing experience. “It affected me in such a way that I still struggle to articulate it.”

Malachi Kirby as Kunta Kinte in Roots
BBC

He didn’t know it then, but three years later a 25-year-old Kirby would be boarding a plane to New Orleans to begin production on an updated “reimagining” of the same story, this time produced by LeVar Burton and Mark Wolper, son of the original Roots producer David L. Wolper. In a cast that includes Forest Whitaker, Laurence Fishburne, Matthew Goode, James Purefoy and Anika Noni Rose, the young, London-born actor had been cast as the lead, Kunta Kinte.

The new Roots comes to BBC Four next Wednesday and has already been lauded by US audiences and critics, after first airing there last summer. Kirby’s performance was singled out for particular praise, yet even before that American embrace, he felt a strong sense that this story was his story too.

“My last name is a direct result of [slavery],” he says. “I don’t really know where to tell you I’m from. I was born in London, my parents was born in London. Grandparents, as far as I know, Jamaican. I don’t know my history past my grandparents. There aren’t any pictures of them, I don’t know their names.”

Kirby learnt a bit more about his heritage when, as part of the promotion for the series, he and some other cast members were invited to take a DNA test.

“It told me what I’d guessed before, which is that 75 per cent of my DNA is West African, 21 per cent South Asian and then there’s various other parts.” He grins: “It’s really cheesy but basically Roots got me to find out my own roots.”

You wouldn’t guess it from Kirby’s spot-on American accent in the latest series of Black Mirror but he honed his craft appearing in the usual proving grounds of British telly; Casualty, Silent Witness, The Bill. In 2012, he played convicted murderer Danny McLean in My Murder, a BBC3 docu-drama about the 2008 killing of Shakilus Townsend. Townsend was played by Star WarsJohn Boyega, an old friend of Kirby’s from their days as students at East London’s Identity School of Acting. In 2014, Kirby’s stint on EastEnders playing Nancy Carter’s fiancé coincided with Danny Dyer’s introduction to the soap. Kirby got on well with his co-star: “He loved to laugh, cracking jokes all the time, and also I got a sense like he really looks out for people, y’know? He’s cool.”

BBC/A+E

Stage roles offered the chance to experiment and earned Kirby a 2011 nomination for Outstanding Newcomer at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards but until recently the screen parts he was offered were limited to drug-dealers and gang-members: “I remember there was a point when I got into conversation with a casting director before an audition. We just had a bit of a chat and she was like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re so lovely? Why are you playing a gang member?!’ Then she stopped casting me as them, basically, and started opening opportunities for other roles … I guess my headshot looked like a gang leader.”

'There was a period when I had apple pie as a treat every day of the week. It's not an obsession, it's love'

Malachi Kirby

It’s easy to imagine how that conversation might have gone, because in person Kirby is indeed unfailingly lovely and remarkably polite. When we meet, the first thing he does is apologise for the bad weather outside.

He’s always had this peaceable temperament, he says. On the Battersea estate where he grew up, some of the other kids got into trouble, “stealing mopeds and blowing them up … just silly things”, but Kirby was more likely to be found in his room reading “Artemis Fowl, Philip Pullman, the Harry Potters and Lord of The Rings … Pretty much most of my books were fantasy” or writing his own stories about far-off lands and make-believe worlds.

He converted to Christianity a few years ago and these days his greatest vice seems to be an intense appreciation for apple pie: “It’s not an obsession, it’s love; there’s a difference,” he says, firmly. “There was a period when I had apple pie as a treat every day of the week. I mean, like, a family apple pie. This is why I say ‘love’, because apple pie is the one thing I can eat and never get fat off.”

Even when he’s kidding around, Kirby has a kind of self-possession which, on screen, translates into that elusive quality “presence”. He credits his inner-calm to spending lots of time in his own company, as an only child, but also to the influence of his mother, who became a single parent after Kirby’s father died when he was six.

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“He left a big impact on me in that short space of time, a good impact, but it was my mum pretty much who raised me.” It must be incredible for her to see him now, her son, starring as a character she introduced him to, in a show which clearly meant so much to her? “My mum is …interesting,” he laughs. “So, like, she’s very expressive and loving but even if she does get excited about any of my achievements, she won’t show it … There’s something about her that wants to keep me humble.”

BBC/A+E

Kirby has inherited this sangfroid, in that he insists he’s never been star-struck and can conceive of no situation in which he would be: “If I met the person who invented apple pie, maybe.” Unlike many in his profession, he was never in it for the attention. Kirby grew up as the shy kid. “Even around my family, I hardly spoke. I was very reserved.” Now he uses this innate introversion to his advantage. It makes life more exciting because, “now it’s a challenge every time I speak” and it’s given him a natural facility for method acting: “I wasn’t a performer, so if I was to act I needed to be that person. If you asked Malachi to perform, I’d just go back to shy guy.”

In a few days Kirby is off to Los Angeles to meet with his management but there are no specific plans and no anxiety about the vista of unscheduled time opening up before him. What will he do next? “That’s the thing, I do. Like, I just ‘do’… I don’t see myself as an actor. It’s something I do sometimes. I meet up with people and enjoy spending time with them. I live and things happen and I just do and I keep doing.”

Follow Ellen E Jones on Twitter: @MsEllenEJones

Roots start on BBC4 on Wednesday February 8 at 9pm

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