‘One Night In Miami’: Four Iconic Men Celebrate In Regina King’s Feature Film Directorial Debut

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 heavyweight 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).

‘One Night In Miami,’ based on the award-winning play of the same name, and directed by Regina King, … 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.

Watch the  ‘One Night in Miami’ trailer:

A Happy Accident and An Obsession

The idea for the play which evolved into the movie ‘One Night In Miami’…came to Kemp Powers, who wrote the script for both the play and the movie, by accident and maybe by fate.

“I stumbled across the idea while reading a book about the intersection of sports and the civil rights movement. It mentioned that following his first defeat of Sonny Liston, Cassius Clay, who would one day become Muhammad Ali, went back to the Hampton House Hotel in Overtown, Florida near Miami where he spent a quiet evening in conversation with friends Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown,” says Powers. “This was just a little paragraph in a book that kind of blew my mind at the time. I read that paragraph once, then I had to go back and read it a few more times and go, wait a minute.”

That accident became an obsession.

“I couldn’t get that paragraph out of my mind. After all, these were four of my heroes. I became very obsessed about this idea of discovering how these men met and why they were hanging out with one another,” explains Powers. “I read every biography I could on each of the four men. I dug up every interview that I could find. The more I learned about them, the more that it seemed natural that they would have been drawn to one another. They were unapologetic in their art. They were unapologetic in their political beliefs. And in the early 1960s to be a free, unapologetic Black man was quite a rarity.”

Part of the reason Powers penned the play is the generational relevance of the conversation that took place in the Hampton House Hotel still has today.

“I wrote the play because the lives of all four of these men speak to me. The debate and conversation they engage in during the stage play is actually the same debate that I would have in my dormitory with my friends when I was attending Howard University,” explains the writer. “It’s this question of what are the social responsibilities of an artist of color? Should I want to have social responsibilities? Can I just be an athlete? Can I just be a singer? Can I just be an artist? Why do I always have to be a Black artist? And the question is, should you embrace that? Should you try to go away from it? And that was the discussion that I was having in the 1990s in my dormitory, and I’m sure that there’s a group of teenagers and young adults of color having that debate right now in their dormitory.”

One Night in Miami, the play which is an imagining of what may have transpired that night, premiered at the Rogue Machine Theater in Los Angeles in June of 2013. After seeing one of those performances, Jody Klein became such a fan that he wanted to get involved with the play and became a producer of both the play and the film.

Regina King’s Feature Film Directorial Debut

Once the producers decided to move forward, they were next tasked with finding a director. During that time Regina King won her Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in If Beale Street Could Talk. She later won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in the same film.

Producers reached out to King’s agent and were told that for her feature film directorial debut she was actually looking for a project that was based on historical figures, that had an important message, and could have strong performances.

“I knew I wanted to do the film because we don’t get the opportunity to see Black men celebrated in such a complex way that often in film and TV,” explains King. “Normally when we see Black men in film or on TV, we are not able to see them be vulnerable and strong at the same time. That is something I felt Kemp captured so amazingly well. I became a part of the project because I was so inspired by the script which gives the opportunity to explore and respect these men in a moment and truly see who they were as men beyond and behind their iconic images.

The Collaborative King

While King came to her feature film directorial debut with a strong sense of her vision, cast and crew speak of her openness to collaboration largely due to what some referred to as King’s being an actor’s director.

“Regina is truly an actor’s director,” says Goree. “She has very consistent energy. She never showed the cast anything but positivity, great ideas, energy, and creativity.”

“When I hear that I think part of it is the way we communicate. There is a shorthand, there is a sensitivity that I have with the journey an actor has to take,” says King. “By being an actor, you are deciding to do something where you have to be vulnerable. Perhaps being an actor’s director helps me better understand that vulnerable moment.”

“A big reason that I became involved with the project was that Regina King was directing. To be a part of her first film directorial debut is a great honor and also a great responsibility because you don’t want to mess it up,” says Hodge. “We’re lucky as actors because she is coming from an acting foundation. She understands what our process is, how we go through it, what we’re thinking, and she understands how to talk to us and help us reach a choice without forcing us to get to that place. So it’s a really easy sort of environment and a colloquial sort of back and forth when it comes to figuring out how we put this whole thing together.”

“Because Regina is such a wonderful actor there’s a sensitivity about how she works. It’s amazing to work with someone who understands the acting process as much as she does. It’s a game-changer,” says Ben-Adir. She is unintrusive and lets me have full reign in my sort of crazy process and method. She created a very safe and special place.”

“Regina is a wonderful acting coach,” says Odom. “The way she was able to coach and guide me into giving her what she wanted was a great gift.”

Casting the Legends

One of the biggest casting challenges facing King and the producers was that the film revolves around not just real people but legends. And while they didn’t have to be dead ringers for the legends they were portraying, the actors had to have some type of resemblance. Filling the four lead roles are Kingsley Ben-Adir (Malcolm X), Aldis Hodge (Jim Brown), Leslie Odom, Jr. (Sam Cooke), and Eli Goree (Cassius Clay).

“Sometimes actors portray real people but the audience may not be familiar with what that person looks like, acts like or sounds like, or knows anything about those people especially when you compare them to our icons,” says King. “The audience knows so much about these four men that they are ready to cancel you out. It was a huge undertaking for the actors to step into the responsibility of these roles which each of them handled so amazingly well.”

“Some actors wouldn’t audition for the role of Malcolm X because of Denzel Washington’s outstanding Oscar-nominated portrayal of the man in the movie Malcolm X.,” says King. “But Kingsley embraced this as an opportunity as an actor to tell this story with a perspective that is different than the biography of Malcolm X.”

Ben-Adir’s work on Malcolm X intensified more as they moved into filming.

“His rigorous process of preparation for how to play Malcolm is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen,” adds Keith Calder of the British actor. “He seems to have a total grasp on not just the material of our script, but he’ll wander around the set just speaking like Malcolm X and reciting the speeches – it’s uncanny to see the resemblance.”

“Watching Kingsley transforming into Malcolm X has been awe-inspiring to me. He has been such an incredible study of Malcolm X,” says Powers. “He has brought so much depth to this part. His performance is going to be one of the big surprises of this film.”