WHEN PETTY CRIMINAL William ‘Bill’ O’Neal was picked up by police in Chicago while trying to hijack a car in 1966, his life took a drastic twist.
Kaluuya is fantastic at inhabiting Hampton’s physical strength and charisma, while Stanfield’s nervy depiction of the sly O’Neal is perfectly pitched. Kaluuya recently won Best Supporting Actor at the recent Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice Awards in the US for his role. Dominique Fishback plays Deborah Johnson, Hampton’s partner and mother of his son.
The film comes from the Warner Bros stable. King says that many studios were approached about making it, but “didn’t feel like it would be commercial enough”. That attitude wasn’t a surprise to King. He says the realisation that it was going to be tricky to get a studio on board “was another time in my life as a Black man in this world where I was like wait – remember? Like, of course…”
Similarly, it’s not a hagiography of Hampton, but fully shows his youthful intensity and ability to think beyond the binaries of the time and make an impact on marginalised communities. The viewer is left in no doubt about his aims and what he accomplished, even in the face of an FBI that wanted to bring him down.
King says that while making the movie, and particularly working with Stanfield, “it was like, you have to think about instances in your life when you prioritised yourself; whether you do that all the time. You know what I mean?”