Jovan Adepo winces. Yes, his first film role was as Denzel Washington’s troubled young son in Fences, the Oscar-winning adaptation of August Wilson’s drama. His second was in Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! and his third is the lead in JJ Abrams’s new horror blockbuster, Overlord. In between he has done some pretty top-drawer TV (HBO’s The Leftovers, Facebook’s Sorry For Your Loss). But don’t suggest to him that such success is instant – or even premature.
“I’ve heard people say that,” Adepo smiles over an underlying grumble, on a brisk afternoon at a New York cafe. “When you do award runs, people ask: ‘Isn’t this daunting? Starting up top?’ It could be kind of a shock, I get it. But that sucks. Everyone’s got their moments of good work coming in, sure, but who wants to hear it put like that? Like, ‘Thanks, guess it’s all downhill from here.’”
Spoiler: it isn’t. In Overlord, a gnarly, big-budget B-movie throwback featuring Nazi-bred monsters, Adepo is magnetic as Private Boyce, a soft-spoken, Louisiana-bred paratrooper petrified by the prospect of being airdropped into the thick of D-day in 1944. But before long, he is in command of his new environment. One suspects the actor could relate.
Born in 1988 in Upper Heyford, in Oxfordshire, to an African American father and Nigerian-English mother, Adepo’s family relocated to the US when he was two. He holds dual citizenship without feeling, he says, much connection to the UK. Rather, he grew up in Maryland the “all-American boy”; a hardworking student focused on political science with an eye on moving into the meatier side of journalism. Yet he harboured dreams of acting and was able to realise them after moving to Los Angeles. That said, his breakthrough came back home in Maryland, in 2012, when a fellow worshipper at the church the family frequented suggested he meet her sister, Viola Davis.
Their connection was immediate and the older actor became his mentor. “When I had questions about the craft, when I felt insecure, she would comfort me in the knowledge that she felt the same way earlier in her career,” Adepo says. “She knew that, in moments like that, you take the help people are offering you, suck it all up, and just do it.”
Key among Davis’s tips was “work your ass off”. Adepo duly enrolled in method classes with Lee Strasberg’s disciple Dianne Hull. The Leftovers led to an audition for Fences – pressure intensified by Davis’s presence, potentially playing his mother. “I was driving myself crazy,” he says. “I knew this would be my one opportunity to work with Denzel Washington and if I didn’t bring it, I’d never get the chance again.”
“Determination,” he says, knuckles rapping on the table, “was seeping out of my pores. It was a high-stakes situation, emotionally and even spiritually, so maybe that served the character of Corey well. He’s uptight around his father, the same way I felt being around Denzel, who was just sitting there in the room when I walked in. Drove me crazy.”
Such pressure affected him far more, he says, than the faintly racist fallout from a few Abrams fanboys over Overlord, demanding to know how a black actor was cast in a white regiment in 1944. “People have brought this up to me, like: ‘Y’know, if you did your research, you’d know African-American and Caucasian soldiers weren’t allowed to fight alongside each other.’ Man, if you did your research, you would know they weren’t really fighting monsters!” With a note of pride, Adepo tells me his character was conceived as white, then tweaked to fit the actor.
Shooting involved excruciating parachute harnesses (“your privates are attached to your throat, basically”) and phobia-stoking stunts. The film begins with a teeth-rattling setpiece that starts on board a plane making up the Allied airborne armada, follows Boyce through the air and into the briny deep, then finishes on a stretch of shoreline engulfed by an active firefight.
“I’m wired up, so that I can physically be thrown out of the plane,” he says. “We were in a big gyroscopic rig 50ft in the air, all day long, and I remember spinning and thinking that I was in hell. It was awful. I was getting dizzy, just trying not to puke. But when I saw the final product, I was like: ‘OK, worth it.’”
He prepares to leave, back to work on Ava DuVernay’s Netflix series about the Central Park Five miscarriage of justice case (hence his shaved head and steak-heavy physique). A coffee with this most committed and serious-minded of actors is enough to clock why he is so eager to deflect accusations of an unduly speedy ascent. “I want to pay my dues and earn my stripes,” he says. “Keep on doing what I’ve been doing.” The wince broadens into a grin. “I try to keep it funky.”
Overlord is in cinemas now