Actor John Boyega sat down with Vanity Fair to discuss the development of his career. In an exclusive July 11 interview, Boyega opened up about wanting to play a new variety of characters and diversify his acting career. He talked specifically about his upcoming sci-fi action comedy film They Cloned Tyrone and how his history of playing Finn in the recent Star Wars films has shaped what people think of him in the world of media.
He began by, early on in the interview, saying that he was looking to gain more versatility with They Cloned Tyrone. Boyega said, “Just versatility, really. I think the franchise thing is a gift, but it has an element of sometimes securing you in one role so people don’t see you as anything different. People actually think that’s your personality and that’s who you are, so you end up having to fight against being a caricature of yourself or the character that you’re most known for. So I was kind of like, “Let’s go in the opposite direction.”
“With The Woman King, with Breaking, with They Cloned Tyrone, I wanted projects where, if I put the characters beside each other, you could blatantly tell the difference. They had different personality traits, they had different accents, they had different ways they walked. I wanted to exercise those muscles and show people what’s up.”
After nearly 10 years since he signed up to play Finn in Star Wars, Boyega described the character as one that greatly defined his career and also how directors and casting agencies saw him as.
“I think the great thing a franchise does is it puts you in a position to be discussed and considered for certain types of roles,” He praised. “But then it also comes with a challenge where you have to diversify. You have to have versatility. When the franchise is done, the question of what you’re doing next, and what your longevity is, starts to become quite prominent. And also, when it’s Star Wars specifically, you want to not have the Star Wars curse, which is you don’t get to do other roles and are tied to that universe for the rest of your career. I think I was just always working against that notion.”
He admitted that he felt like the industry “cast him as Finn in everything.”
Boyega explained, “That’s just the natural symptom of a franchise process. You see Chris Hemsworth. You think Thor. You see Chris Evans, you think Captain America. You see Robert Downey Jr., you think Iron Man. These are all great actors who I feel could lean away from that—or not. It’s a choice. My personal choice is just to be seen as an artist that can jump into several different stories while giving you a sense of familiarity. “He can entertain me in each kind of genre,” which is fun. It’s fun for me.”
Despite his respect for those types of characters and the genre, Boyega is ready to move on from his established character stereotype with They Cloned Tyrone. “If they do call you back to be characters on lunch boxes, whether it’s a superhero or whatever, at least they have in mind that this is an actor that does characters. He searches for the roles that are significantly different. So if we’re going to give him a superhero role or whatever it is, we’re going to make that superhero unique. We just don’t want it to be “cool John Boyega” with squinty eyes and nice eyebrows,” Boyega laughed.
According to Vanity Fair, 31-year-old Boyega will star in the upcoming Netflix movie They Cloned Tyrone, which debuts July 14. He plays “Tyrone Fontaine, a merciless drug dealer, surviving on the mean streets of an unspecified inner city through a mix of indifference and violence. He discovers—alongside a pimp named Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and a prostitute named Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris)—that they are all being manipulated by a shadowy organization that deploys backup versions of some of them in order to keep the community suppressed and destabilized.”
