Marvel's Secret Invasion Had The Good Taste To Cast Kingsley Ben-Adir
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has hit some box-office and off-screen road bumps over the last year, but the brand keeps on expanding as the company builds to its next mega-blockbuster in 2024's "Captain America: Brave New World." Whereas Phase 4 was plagued by too much narrative wheel-spinning, Phase 5, which kicked off with "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantamania" has hit the ground running with stories of consequence, and, most importantly, villains who register as more than placeholders. While we wait to see how the assault allegations against Jonathan Majors impact the future of Kang in the MCU saga going forward, we can, at least, revel in the introduction of Kingsley Ben-Adir's Gravik in "Secret Invasion."
The London-born, Guildhall School of Music and Drama graduate makes a deep, despicable impression in the first episode of the series as Gravik, a Skrull terrorist leader hellbent on claiming the Earth for his people, when he initiates an attack that leaves thousands dead. Then he goes and makes it personal by murdering Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) in front of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson).
Though we've yet to get anywhere approaching a full measure of Gravik, Ben-Adir imbues his baddie with an air of mystery and inscrutable menace. We may not like this guy, but, as with all great baddies, we can't wait to spend more time with him. The same holds true for Ben-Adir, except we really, really like him, and have been waiting for this tremendously talented performer to become a bona-fide star.
An hard-working actor whose time has, at long last, come
British theatergoers became acquainted with Ben-Adir in the early 2010s via small but acclaimed turns in notable productions like Mark Rylance's "Much Ado About Nothing." He also popped in "Peaky Blinders" as Colonel Ben Younger, an Army intelligence officer who meets a bad end when he obtains compromising information about Sam Claflin's Oswald Mosley.
For the hundreds of moviegoers who got around to seeing Guy Ritchie's "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword," Ben-Adir stood out as Wet Stick, the colorful childhood friend of the title monarch. But his breakthrough arrived in 2020 when he played two vital figures in U.S. history: Malcolm X in "One Night in Miami" and Barack Obama in "The Comey Rule." Due respect to Billy Ray's scrupulous political drama, it was the actor's sharply focused portrayal of the uncompromising civil rights activist in Regina King's adaptation of Kemp Powers' deeply moving stage play that established Ben-Adir as one of the most exciting actors working today.
A change is gonna come for Ben-Adir's career
I was fortunate enough to see the original production of "One Night in Miami" in Los Angeles, and there is simply no matching Jason Delane's singular portrait of an acutely intelligent man who, having seen his bloody endgame on the chessboard of life, desperately tries to transmit his sense of purpose to the let-the-good-times-roll soul superstar that is Sam Cooke.
But in King's take on this imagined drama, set on the night Muhammad Ali shook up the world by whupping Sonny Liston for the Heavyweight Championship (after which he declared his allegiance to the Nation of Islam), Ben-Adir dances around Malcolm's solemnity like the Greatest flitted butterfly-like about the ring. He still has to deal with Cooke's prideful intransigence, but the man who preached Black militancy to his people taps into his inner salesman. It's a more traditional portrayal than Delane affected, but it gets the job done, brilliantly so.
Right now, as far as I'm concerned, Ben-Adir is the selling point for "Secret Invasion." We love to see our great actors strip the meat off the bad-guy bone (Alan Rickman was a master, but, in the public's eye, he's Hans Gruber first), and this is confirmation that Ben-Adir is working in rarefied air. Consider this a pulpy prelude to his next major disappearing act, which will find him bringing a reggae legend to life in Reinaldo Marcus Green's "Bob Marley: One Love."
Kingsley Ben-Adir is primed to explode.