Daniel Kaluuya has been on a real roll in recent years. After rising up through British TV shows like Skins, The Fades, and Black Mirror, he became a major screen presence in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. (That shot of Kaluuya’s wide-open eye with a tear pouring down his cheek might be the most iconic horror visual of the 2010s.) And from there he’s propelled himself through plenty more stellar turns in great movies, from Black Panther, to Widows, to last year’s Queen & Slim. For his latest turn, he’s taking the chance to portray an undersung Black icon on screen: Fred Hampton, a leader of the Black Panther party, in the upcoming Judas And The Black Messiah.
Shaka King’s film – produced by Ryan Coogler – not only brings a much-needed new portrayal of the Black Panther movement to the big screen, but delivers it in a tense and twisting tale which sees Hampton spied upon by LaKeith Stanfield’s William O’Neal – an FBI informant who infiltrated the party’s ranks. “Sixty to 70 per cent of the articles that appeared in the press in the ‘60s and ‘70s about the Panthers were literally composed by the FBI,” Shaka King tells Empire in the new issue. “So the history has been put forth by the people who crushed them and assassinated them and imprisoned so many of them.” If Judas And The Black Messiah hopes to address that imbalance, the result is part paranoid thriller, part tragedy, part tale of a civil rights leader whose story has rarely been told. “We decided to make it a two-hander and essentially Trojan-horse a Hampton biopic in a crime drama in an undercover movie,” King says.
For the role of Hampton – who was leader of the Black Panther party’s Illinois chapter by the age of 20 – King found exactly what he was looking for in Kaluuya. “With Daniel Kaluuya, there’s a level of gravitas and maturity to him that you don’t really see in someone that young,” he says. “He has a youthful charisma and he has this old soul, which is a very powerful combination. The first time we met, that came through very clearly to me. And I was like, there’s no-one else.”
Read Empire’s full feature on Judas And The Black Messiah in the Greatest Cinema Moments Ever issue, on sale Thursday 21 January and available to order online here. The film is expected the hit UK screens on 26 February.