During a panel at the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo on Saturday, April 12th, with podcast host Josh Horowitz, John Boyega shared how he had only £45 to his name when he was cast as Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Boyega, 33, looked back on his career during a panel at the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo on Saturday, April 12, with podcast host Josh Horowitz. The British star had been acting professionally for nearly a decade before he was cast as Finn, a stormtrooper-gone-rogue, in 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens. In conversation, he said he will “never forget the day” director J.J. Abrams sent him an email asking him to talk, following several rounds of auditions.
“I had been auditioning for so long, so I felt like he kind of took away my dignity a little bit,” Boyega said. “So I decided to pretend as if I was busy, you know, when you just pretend that you’re busy. ‘I got other stuff to do, J.J.,’ ” Boyega recalled. “He goes, ‘Where are you?’ And I said ‘I’m at this art show in Greenwich, mate. I’m very, very busy. Where are you?’ He goes, ‘Well, I’m in Mayfair and [at a] restaurant. Need to talk to you now. And we’ll talk about something important.’ ”
“And I go, ‘Okay, okay, I’m gonna be right there.’ At the time I had £45 in my account. It took £33 and 83p to get to J.J. Do the math,” he added.
Boyega said that when he arrived at the restaurant to meet Abrams, the filmmaker was seated in a closed-off section of the building.
“So I go in. Each step I took, I was nervous. I was like, ‘Okay, cool.’ You know, J.J. is a phenomenal, nice guy, and if he was to tell me I didn’t get the part, he would still feed me,” the actor continued. “And so I sat down and, J.J. just said, ‘Thank you so much for coming back. I know we’ve kind of [strained] you with this amount of auditions.’ At that time, I took it upon myself to try and get another audition and go like, ‘J.J., please. Look, I can audition again. I can do British, Scottish, Nigerian, whatever. And he goes, ‘You’re [in Star Wars].’ “
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Image: Barry Brecheisen/WireImage
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