The actor reveals the process of embodying Fred Hampton, a revolutionary and civil rights leader ahead of his time., Daniel Kaluuya plays Fred Hampton, the former chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and a co-founder of the Rainbow Coalition, whose killing in a 1969 raid was the result of an FBI counterintelligence operation.
I read the majority of the books on the Black Panther reading list. You needed to have six weeks of political education in order to be a fully fledged Black Panther. I just really opened my mind and opened my outlook on certain philosophies, certain ideas that you've heard the derivative version of. But these books were the source material, essentially. And when [the film was] greenlit, I went to Chicago, by myself, just went there.
If I led with pressure, I feel like I wouldn't be serving — I feel like it'd be about me, or what I am doing. This is a man who lived, and he spoke truth. How do I serve that? You know, how do I bring myself to that? What Shaka has said is, there's a lot of information about [Hampton's] death, and this is an opportunity to show how remarkably he lived. He's [meant] to be a vessel for the ideas and the beliefs and the philosophies and the strategies that he lived to this day, you know, in American society, rooted in chairman Fred Hampton's mind. So it was an honor to play that.Oh, Shaka! Shaka was amazing. A year before the shoot, we spent, like, four days together just talking about the film.
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