Reach For The Stars

He has crossed the Atlantic, from Peckham to Hollywood, carrying multiple blockbusters on his newly broad shoulders. But while John Boyega’s star is in the ascendant, his feet remain firmly on the ground – thanks to a few fundamental life lessons learned along the way. Take note and look up.

- Jamie Millar

You may remember John Boyega from such films as Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. In fact, you’d have to be a resident of Ahch-To to have missed them. But today, in LA, MH is talking to the Camberwell-born, Peckham-raised actor about his other sci-fi juggernaut, Pacific Rim Uprising. Clearly the south Londoner is not one to do things by halves.

Released this month, Uprising is a sequel to the enjoyable 2013 original, set in a near future in which humanity faces an epidemic of building-sized, city-levelling monsters called Kaiju (from the Japanese “strange beast”). Mankind responds in the only logical way: by constructing building sized, humanoid machines called Jaegers (German for “hunters”) to duke it out with them. Think Godzilla meets Transformers. 

“I was looking for another franchise to be a part of,” says Boyega of what attracted him to the project. “The big things for me were the story, characters and themes of the film.” Uprising was evidently a “big” enough thing for the precocious 25-year-old to decide to produce it, too, through his own company Upper Room. Crucially, his diary was free. “It felt like the stars were aligning, innit?”