There's not much I know about the exact politics of Somalia today." He hasn't been back to the country yet. A lot of people try to ask me political questions. "It was just all about the script." Which must make the treatment of him by some media as a spokesman for the Somali community especially odd, and a little daunting. "No, we never talked about that," he says quickly. He bristles when I ask him if he was expected to bring any of his experiences of Somalian life to his character. But the forked path in his childhood, which could have resulted in a life not unlike his character's, apparently had no bearing on his preparation for the role. He's happy about the cameras, he's smiling for them."Īs a child, Abdi lived in Somalia amid the beginnings of civil unrest. That shows you how he doesn't know what deep trouble he's in. "When he gets caught, the footage of him smiling… It's different, someone crying and someone laughing. Abdi says he tried to empathise with the naivety of the real Abduwali Muse (now doing 33 years in a US prison). The pirate's credulity regarding the US authorities' bogus ransom negotiations may make for a happy ending, but it's also the moment when America's superpower seems almost tragically all-consuming.
Yet it's Muse's vulnerability, rather than his aggression, on which the film's emotional and political impact hinges. "I never understood how big a line it was until the trailer came out and it kept getting bigger. Muse's sinister order to Phillips in that scene – "Look at me, I'm the captain now" – was an unscripted line that came "in the heat of the moment, because he wasn't talking to me, he was just talking, shutting me down." It's the first battle cry in the pair's hair-raising physical and mental skirmish and has become something approaching a catchphrase. So it's just: 'Hey, I'm here.'" The need to assert himself over Hanks with the help of nothing more than swagger is what gives Abdi's performance such an edge. This guy is nobody and this guy is an Oscar winner. I know who he is, but he doesn't know who I am. Greengrass purposely kept the two apart before their first scene in order to harness the real-life dynamic. Despite Hanks being a mentor of sorts to his co-star – "He tells me, career-wise, just use it wisely and work your hardest" – Abdi spends the film engaged in battle with the Hollywood heavyweight, both in terms of the story and screen presence. When he got there he doesn't want to mess up, he doesn't want to celebrate early." That wasn't the only convenient parallel. " was feeling exactly the same way as I was feeling. One bonus of his on-set anxiety was that Abdi could feed it back into the fragile resolve of his character. He told me: 'Don't think about the whole movie, just think about today.'" I remember on the first day, I was so nervous. It was Greengrass, the British film-maker behind United 93 and The Bourne Supremacy, who both guided and relied heavily on Abdi during the Captain Phillips shoot, with the nuances in the novice's acting carrying much of the story. "When you work with a great director you realise you are far from being a director." "I was working on my own film, too, but it never worked out," he says sheepishly. But Abdi wasn't a complete newcomer to the film-making process, previously jobbing as a director on Somali hip-hop videos.
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Much has been made of Somali-born Abdi's previous life as a limousine driver in Minneapolis, where his family settled when he was a teenager his story touted as that of the most unlikely zero-to-hero American dreamer. We loved acting and we really wanted to get this." "We auditioned together, we went home and we practised. Three of his friends were cast as his cronies. "They asked me easy questions – 'What's your name? 'Where were you born?' – and they assigned me to a character and gave me a script." After the open audition, targeted at Minneapolis's sizeable Somali community, Abdi's quietly authoritative presence won him the role of Muse, the pirate ringleader who wrangles with Tom Hanks's Phillips for control over the hefty American cargo ship. He's managing to look only vaguely weary despite recounting the inauspicious beginnings to his success story for what must be the millionth time.
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"There was an open casting call on TV and I went," says Abdi.
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