John Boyega British Actor Born 1992 in London

Early life

John Adedayo Bamidele Adegboyega, who acts under the name John Boyega, was born on 17 March 1992 in Camberwell, London, and grew up in Peckham. His first stage role was as a leopard in a school play at Oliver Goldsmith Primary School. When he was nine, the artistic director of Theatre Peckham, a theatre for young people in south London, noticed him, and he spent time there outside school hours until he was fourteen.

He began secondary school at Westminster City School in 2003 and appeared in several school productions. From 2008 to 2010 he studied for a National Diploma in Performing Arts at South Thames College, where he played Othello in a college production. He then enrolled at the University of Greenwich to study film studies and media writing but left to concentrate on acting. He trained at the Identity School of Acting in London and became a patron of its Los Angeles branch when it opened in 2018.

Career

Before his film debut Boyega appeared on stage in Six Parties at the National Theatre and Category B at the Tricycle Theatre. His screen debut came with the lead role of a teenage gang leader in the comedy horror film Attack the Block in 2011. That year he also played Jamal, a drug dealer, in the British drama Junkhearts, and Screen International named him one of its UK Stars of Tomorrow. He was later cast in the adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun, playing Ugwu.

His international breakthrough was Finn, a stormtrooper who leaves the First Order, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, released on 18 December 2015. He repeated the role in The Last Jedi in 2017 and The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. In January 2016 he founded the production company UpperRoom Entertainment. Its first film was Pacific Rim: Uprising in 2018, which it co-produced with Legendary Entertainment and in which he played the lead, Jake Pentecost.

Other film work in 2017 included Detroit, Kathryn Bigelow's film about the 1967 riots in that city, in which he played a security guard, and The Circle. In 2020 he appeared in the anthology Small Axe by Steve McQueen, playing the police officer Leroy Logan in Red, White and Blue. In 2022 he starred in Breaking, directed by Abi Damaris Corbin, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival under the title 892. The same year he played King Ghezo in Gina Prince-Bythewood's historical epic The Woman King, alongside Viola Davis, Thuso Mbedu and Lashana Lynch. In 2023 he took the title role, and several other parts, in the Netflix science-fiction comedy They Cloned Tyrone. In October 2024 it was announced that he would play the singer Otis Redding opposite Danielle Deadwyler in the biographical film Otis & Zelma. In total his listed screen credits run from 2011 to 2023, and the film with the largest worldwide box-office figure among them is The Force Awakens, at about 2.07 billion dollars.

Recognition

In 2016 Boyega received the Trophée Chopard at the Cannes Film Festival and the BAFTA Rising Star Award. He appeared in the Top 100 of the Powerlist, which lists influential people of African and African-Caribbean descent in the United Kingdom, in 2020 and 2021, and New African magazine named him among the 100 most influential Africans in 2020.

Public roles

Boyega has spoken publicly on racial justice. During a Black Lives Matter rally in Hyde Park in London in 2020 he gave a speech in which he referred to George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin and Stephen Lawrence. In an interview with British GQ the same year he criticised the way his Star Wars character was treated in the sequel trilogy, saying that a character promoted as important should not then be sidelined. Lucasfilm responded by reiterating its support for him and for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Through UpperRoom, he has also developed projects as a producer, including a series based on childhood experiences that he is working on with the writer and director Sebastian Thiel, and the production company has a first-look arrangement with VIS Kids. In May 2021 it was announced that he would work again with Joe Cornish on a sequel to Attack the Block.