'One Night In Miami' Cast Breaks Down The Pivotal Rooftop Conversation
One Night in Miami will undoubtedly be a key player in the upcoming awards season. Regina King was recently nominated for Best Director at the Golden Globes, and the adapted screenplay by Kemp Powers earned a nomination from the Writers Guild of America. While we wait to see how the film fares when the Academy Awards nominations are announced next month, the film's cast members reunited virtually to break down one of the pivotal scenes for the American Film Institute. Watch below.
One Night in Miami Rooftop Scene Breakdown
AFI had cast members Leslie Odom Jr., Eli Goree, Aldis Hodge, and Kingsley Ben-Adir sit down to take a closer look at the One Night in Miami scene in which their respective characters Sam Cooke, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and Malcolm X have another heated conversation about their place in the Civil Rights movement as Black men with prominent voices in culture.
As the cast reveals, this scene is one that was actually created solely for the film and doesn't appear in the play on which the film is based. But since writer Kemp Powers wrote both the play and the script, he was able to create a scene that didn't feel out of place and allowed director Regina King to expand the scope of the settings beyond the hotel room where most of the movie takes place. Though it allowed the characters to venture out of that isolated space, it also presented challenges of its own since it left the cast without props or places to sit, meaning they had to be more contemplative of what they were doing between scenes.
If you haven't yet seen One Night in Miami yet, read the official synopsis below and then go watch it on Amazon Prime.
On one incredible night in 1964, four icons of sports, music, and activism gathered to celebrate one of the biggest upsets in boxing history. When underdog Cassius Clay, soon to be called Muhammad Ali, (Eli Goree), defeats heavy weight champion Sonny Liston at the Miami Convention Hall, Clay memorialized the event with three of his friends: Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge).
Based on the award-winning play of the same name, and directed by Regina King, One Night In Miami... is a fictional account inspired by the historic night these four formidable figures spent together. It looks at the struggles these men faced and the vital role they each played in the civil rights movement and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. More than 40 years later, their conversations on racial injustice, religion, and personal responsibility still resonate.