It’s not hard to see why they called him back. It was horrendous, to the point where I was literally apologising to the casting director. I think I spoke in an Australian accent at one point. I had learnt the lines, but when I got in the room I didn’t remember anything. “Everything you could think of went wrong. His audition was “the worst of my life”, he recalls. Kirby was as surprised as anyone to land the role after a global casting search.
#FIVE NIGHTS AT WARIOS REMAKE SERIES#
Yet this one claims its own ancestry: it is produced by Mark Wolper, son of the original series producer, and executive produced by LeVar Burton, who played the original Kunta Kinte.
#FIVE NIGHTS AT WARIOS REMAKE PLUS#
With the legacy of slavery back on the cultural landscape, thanks to movies such as 12 Years a Slave and Django Unchained, plus TV series Underground, a remake of Roots was almost inevitable. That name is still regularly invoked in movies, TV programmes and rap records – Kendrick Lamar’s hit single King Kunta being the most recent example. He has become a universal ancestor for the African diaspora, an everyman of black history. As such, the plosive, alliterative name of Kunta Kinte still resonates through popular culture. Its finale drew an estimated 140 million viewers in the US – a staggering 70% of the total audience. When it first screened, in the US in January 1977, it was the most-watched programme in television history and, depending on how you measure it, it still is. People under the age of about 50 may only be dimly aware of the original series, but its impact was unprecedented. Its impact was unprecedented … LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte in the 1977 Roots, the most-watched programme in television history. It begins with Kunta, a Mandinka warrior abducted from Gambia and forced to work as a slave on plantations in the American south, and who defies his captors at every stage. Haley’s story claimed (though its authenticity has since been disputed) to chronicle the author’s ancestors from 18th-century Africa up to his own life in the 20th-century US.
It has now been remade – or rather retold – as an expensive eight-hour miniseries, also starring Forest Whitaker, Laurence Fishburne and Anna Paquin. Kirby plays Kunta Kinte, the hero of Alex Haley’s Roots – first a Pulitzer-winning, bestselling novel, then a blockbuster TV event of the 1970s. Sometimes it was just having to run in shoes that were too big.” Sometimes it was the heat, sometimes the cold, the mosquitoes, the horse. “There wasn’t one day that didn’t challenge me – physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally.
“It pushed me to my limits and beyond,” says the 26-year-old Londoner. On top of that, he went through the physical equivalent of a triathlon: running, swimming, horse-riding, rowing and fighting. Over five and a half months, he was shackled, assaulted, abused, imprisoned, beaten, whipped, mutilated and subjected to all manner of psychological torture and torment. N obody could say Malachi Kirby hasn’t earned his breakthrough.