![]() “It was very frightening,” Abdi recalls of the time. It was a very scary time for me and my family.” (His father, a teacher, was in Yemen earning money, leaving Abdi’s mother, his two brothers and a sister Abdi was the second oldest child.) You would find guns everywhere, bullets and bullet parts. Everyone loved each other, everyone was a neighbor, there was a community.” Of the outbreak of civil war in 1991, when he was 6, Abdi remembers: “It turned overnight to chaos, killing and guns. “Growing up in Somalia was beautiful, honestly. Be yourself and be good.’”įor the first seven years of his life, Abdi grew up, “loving the ocean,” in Mogadishu. He would say ‘You’ve done the best you can today, now you have to leave it.’ Tom gave me advice about handling the media and doing interviews. Paul calmed us down, especially me, and told me to work one day at a time. “I didn’t watch the scenes after I did them, I was too nervous. ![]() “I wasn’t confident with myself,” says Abdi. We kept our distance during filming and didn’t go out for dinner until afterwards.” Now Hanks, as seen at the Baftas, is his biggest supporter.įilming was hard. He was more Captain Phillips than Tom Hanks and that made me more my character than me. “If we had met, I’d imagine the results would have been different. The first time Abdi met Hanks was the first time their characters meet on screen, as the hijackers storm the ship, and Abdi delivers the line to Hanks that pivots their characters’ relationship: “I am the captain now.” Not meeting Hanks prior, “helped the dynamics of the film and set the standard,” says Abdi. I used to play soccer as a kid: that helped me balance myself and get my focus.” I could feel the movement of the waves in my legs. I had to learn how to swim and stand still in a skiff. I enjoyed filming it, the rush you get, particularly having to get over or past certain obstacles. Physically the film was very demanding. “To me it was an absolute adventure and fun. I learnt a lot from him-most of all no matter how big you get, you should always work hard.” Tom Hanks is a big star and has been for a long time: acting with him made me feel I could be the best I can. “We came from nothing and we got this,” Abdi said looking at the Bafta.īoth awards were shocks, Abdi tells me, but he was happy to accept them “for the hard work we all did.” With no acting experience, and in his first movie, being around people of the caliber of Hanks and Greengrass made him feel “I had to do the best I could. In his Bafta acceptance speech, Abdi thanked Greengrass “for believing in me before I believed in myself,” Hanks (who whistled and whooped as Abdi took to the stage) for “everything,” his family, and the actors who played the other pirates. Navy SEALs.Ībdi, who was born in Somalia, has been nominated for 28 awards for his role, already winning the Bafta and London Film Critics’ Circle awards for Best Supporting Actor. His three fellow pirates were killed by U.S. The real-life Muse is serving a 33-year jail sentence, at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. The film is tense, unbearably so in places, but building throughout-and the reason for Abdi’s busy awards-season-is a tentative, charged empathy between Muse and Phillips, despite their language and cultural barriers, and the uncomfortable fact that Abdi’s character is threatening the life of St. Captain Richard Phillips, who the pirates held for ransom, is played by Tom Hanks. In Captain Phillips, Abdi plays Abduwali Muse, the lead member of a group of four Somali pirates who hijacked the cargo ship the MV Maersk Alabama in April 2009. If I said that, it would be asking too much.” It would be being greedy to say I wanted to win. Of his thought-to-be-chief rival, Jared Leto for Dallas Buyers Club, Abdi says, “He’s a cool guy, a real star.” Come on, I say you must want to win a little bit. It’s surreal, but I’m enjoying it.”Ībdi, nominated for his role in Paul Greengrass’s piracy/hostage drama Captain Phillips, is preparing an Oscars speech, which is sensible as he just won the Bafta. It’s still something I’m trying to get used to mentally. To be nominated in my first year of acting for my first movie, I’m in shock. Just to be there and be part of it is amazing. I don’t have the guts to think about winning it. “I’m not confident at all,” the 28-year-old actor says. ![]() When I ask Barkhad Abdi how confident he is about winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor on March 2, he laughs down the phone from his family’s home in Minneapolis. ![]()
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