Malachi Kirby is smiling as his gaze drifts up the broad central staircase of Battersea Arts Centre and slips into the past. Some 20 years ago a shy 14-year-old walked through these doors and forever changed his stars. The ten-minute bus ride from Patmore Estate would lead to a far greater journey, one spanning decades and continents, distant pasts and dystopian futures, a constellation of stories coalescing inside him. On this bright January afternoon, Kirby has returned to Battersea to reckon with the distance travelled in the two decades since he took his first drama course down the corridor.
I ask him how it feels being back here. "Weird," he replies after a long pause. In what way? "I've never come back here and reflected on my first time coming here."
Upstairs he shows me the Fireplace Room, the designated chillout area where he would write scripts while the strains of next door's jazz rehearsals filtered through the wall. His play Level Up premiered at the Bush Theatre in 2020 but its gestation came years earlier in this very room. I note the absence of a desk. "You just prop up some pillows," says Kirby.
He only did a term here, weekly classes over a three-month period culminating in a performance for friends and family. In 2007, he enrolled into the Identity School of Acting, part of a gilded generation which included John Boyaga, Damson Idris and his close friend Letitia Wright. Since graduation he has worked more or less constantly, building a formidable body of work.
Kirby was first anointed as the Next Big Thing back in 2011. He was shortlisted for Outstanding Newcomer at the 2011 Evening Standard Theatre Awards for his performance as a troubled schoolboy in the critically acclaimed play Mogadishu. He won awards and praise for playing Kunta Kinte in the 2016 remake of Roots. He won a BAFTA for playing Darcus Howe in Mangrove, the first film in Steve McQueen's seminal Small Axe anthology.
He has enjoyed a phenomenal career - yet his profile is far lower than the likes of his fellow Identity alumni Boyega and Wright, or his Roots co-star (and former Square Mile cover star) Regé-Jean Page. This is partly by choice; he doesn't use social media, and finds the concept of fame ambivalent at best, terrifying at worst. Still, he has yet to find the project to turn his rising star supernova. The lead role in one of the most anticipated TV series of the year? That should do the trick.
A Thousand Blows is the latest series from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. Kirby plays the magnificently monikered Hezekiah Moscow, a Jamaican newly arrived in Victorian London who becomes involved with the all-female crime syndicate the Forty Elephants, while making an enemy of the fearsome bare-knuckle boxer Sugar Goodson.
The cast is exceptional: Stephen Graham plays Sugar, Erin Doherty steals scenes (and wallets) as gang leader Mary Carr. The first season will stream on Disney+, the second has already been filmed. The hype is astronomical and justified.
I first interviewed Kirby over Zoom four years ago to promote the glossy financial thriller Devils. A few months later he was the interviewer, speaking to the great David Oyelowo for our cover feature. He's good at asking questions. He's been asking questions all his life, physical and spiritual. On the running track he would challenge his screaming body to shave another second off his personal best. In the stillness of his bedroom he reached out to God.
After wandering the Arts Centre, we settle on a sofa by the staircase. There is a gravitas to Kirby; he speaks softly, and often takes a moment to arrange his thoughts. Those thoughts are worth the wait.
Square Mile: When you first came here, presumably you had no idea this place would change your life?
Malachi Kirby: No idea. I didn't actually want to act - it was encouragement from my mum. I didn't know what acting was, I didn't know what it was as a career. I didn't know what it was as an art form. It just sounded like something very cringe and way out of my comfort zone. This place played a really significant part in shifting me from the inside, opening or revealing or releasing a side of me that I'd never tapped into.
SM: Did you know that side of you?
MK: I knew it was there but I didn't know it held value. I knew it was there in the sense of play. In the sense of being a kid and being in my bedroom, playing with my toys and my action figures. I had a big imagination and I always read, I always loved novels. Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and Philip Pullman. I was into those kinds of stories, fantasy. I'd watch TV, but I didn't ever consider actors. I never knew how to connect between people that you'd meet in real life and these little people on the screen. It felt like a world very unreachable to me.
I'd never been to the theatre. I used to pass this building every day on the way to school but I never took it in. I definitely didn't know it was a place I'd be allowed into. A really grown-up place. That's one of the most profound things about it: this really old building feels like it's for grown-ups, and actually it's the most playful, childish building in the whole area.
SM: Was there a moment here when you knew you wanted to be an actor?
MK: No, it didn't kick in here. Here is the first time that it felt safe to be silly and essentially just be myself. To not have this kind of false bravado. I was 14 but in my head I was a little man. The idea of being that kind of playful, that kind of silly, that kind of weird and strange, and then getting applause for it - this space initiated that for me. The safety from being vulnerable - that's what I got from this space.
But I didn't go, 'OK, now I want to be an actor.' I just went, 'Oh, OK. That was interesting.' I got to know parts of myself and share parts of myself with people, and it was accepted. Something opened up in me - and I went on a journey, a very long one.
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SM: Was your shyness the reason your mum wanted you to come here?
MK: I imagine so. We've never explicitly had that conversation. I had friends. [Laughing] I sound so sad! I had friends but I spent a lot of time by myself. A lot of time in my own imagination, in my bedroom. Either on the PlayStation or with my toys or with my books, imagining worlds outside of the one I was living in. When I look back on it, all the ingredients were there, I just didn't connect the two worlds.
But yeah, I was very introverted. I was very much in myself and the only place I really opened up around was with Mum. She was the only person that I'd be silly with in that way and be that openly vulnerable. The idea of doing that outside of home wasn't even a consideration.
SM: Are you an only child?
MK: I grew up as an only child, but I have a brother on my dad's side that I connected with later in life. We're really close now. But in terms of growing up, it was just me.
SM: Your dad passed when you were young, right?
MK: Yeah, six.
SM: You spoke about being a little man in your own head. Did you feel like you grew up fast because you were, in inverted commas, 'the man of the house'?
MK: It was that. Literally. Which sounds ridiculous now, but at the time, yeah, in my little head I was the man of the house. I was like, 'Cool, I've got to protect my mum and protect the house and provide something.'
I didn't have a job so my version of that was saving pocket money, saving birthday money, Christmas money. I didn't spend it, really. I just saved it in case Mum ever needed it. I didn't really consider what she did when she left the house. I never went to work with her. In my head it was like, 'Cool, if you ever need it, I've got it.' [Laughs] I didn't have any idea how much bills were!
SM: Neither did I, until I got my first one!
MK: My mum was very good at keeping me a child. Protecting that space and protecting that space of play. Part of me within myself was like, 'I have to be a man!' But even that was in the realm of imagination because I was still a kid.
"The idea of fame makes me anxious," Malachi Kirby told me in 2021. We were discussing Regé-Jean Page, transformed overnight from an unknown actor to a global heartthrob thanks to his role in Bridgeton. A Thousand Blows is unlikely to be quite as transformative for Kirby - it isn't premiering mid-pandemic, thank God - but the series will surely thrust him under a brighter spotlight than ever before. The first episode promises prestige TV of the highest order, with Kirby's aspiring lion tamer Hezekiah, a fighter in every sense, the moral centre of a murky world.
He learned to box the Queensbury Rules at North London's All Stars Boxing Gym, and worked with dialect coach Hazel Holder to nail the Jamaican vernacular of the period. Before filming started, he travelled to Jamaica with Francis Lovehall, who plays Hezekiah's best friend Alec Munroe. "I wanted to spend time in Jamaica on a personal level," says Kirby. "Although I'm Jamaican, I was born here and I wanted to reconnect with that energy and that rhythm and that perspective. There's only so much that I can do, it being 150 years later, but it still felt important."
His maternal grandparents are Jamaican (Kingston and St Mary's); their grandson has visited the island three times but the most recent trip was different than the others. He met with architects, historians: "It was a whole different perspective that I'd never considered in terms of Jamaica. When I'd been there, it had been holiday, it'd been family - it's never been history lessons in that way. It was a really rich time."
His future should be equally rich, if a little more complicated. Shortly into our interview, a young man passes our table and grins at Kirby. "You're famous!" he says. He recognises him from the 2013 comedy Gone Too Far!, in which a Peckham teenager's life is disrupted by his very Nigerian elder brother. They take a photo together and the young man departs, beaming. It's a nice moment but you wouldn't want to experience it multiple times a day.
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SM: A Thousand Blows. How was the audition process?
MK: The audition was me, the casting director, the director and Stephen Graham. I had worked with Stephen on Boiling Point for a very, very brief stint, so that was helpful. He was incredible. He's such an open and generous actor, and he was like that in the audition room. He was there to serve. We did a bit of improv, which was terrifying. There's improv, and then there's improv with Stephen Graham. They got in touch with me shortly after that first audition and offered me the part.
SM: When we last spoke, you said Oliver from Devils was your favourite character you'd played. Has Hezekiah replaced him?
MK: Man, I do like Hezekiah. He's very cool. He goes on a real journey. All of the characters do. It's one of the things I love about the show. Every single character, even the seemingly smaller parts, they all have their arc. It's all unravelled and people you thought were in the background end up in the foreground. But yeah, I do love Hezekiah. When I do a part, I have a process of letting go, detaching from the character and coming back to myself. It's very rare that there are aspects of the character that I want to take with me. But there were so many things about Hezekiah that inspired me.
SM: What inspired you about him?
MK: His way of dealing with trauma or challenges. None of what he's been through defines him. He has a way of not walking around with a chip on his shoulder, not walking around with resentment or any kind of revenge in his heart. There's a grace that he affords, a level of forgiveness he has in himself that I find profound. He's able to manoeuvre and interact with people who did atrocious things and treat them with a grace and a kindness. There's a real integrity to him that I find beautiful. It's a rare thing to have that kind of purity in a person and still also not just be a goody two-shoes.
SM: Did you speak to your grandma about her experiences coming to London?
MK: No, no. We've never really had conversations about acting. Not at all. She watches my stuff when it comes on the TV. Every now and then, when it feels like a special one, I'll come to her and sit down together and watch it. But we've never actually spoken about acting. We speak pretty much about everything else.
I don't speak about work a lot to be honest. Especially with the people closest to me. It's the last thing that I'm thinking of.
SM: Have you thought about how your fame may grow?
MK: I think it may sprout a bit. I've taken some comfort from realising it's service. The more famous you are, the more service you have to give and that I can find peace with. There's a level of sacrifice that comes with it, for sure. And it can be a very noisy place. I am grateful that I can still walk down the street without being recognised. For the most part. So I enjoy that. I enjoy being able to just be, and to be as me.
As soon as you have someone on the screen, whether it's the small screen or the cinema, there's this thing that happens where you become larger than life, separate from life almost. The thing that scares me about fame is the idea of becoming something other than human. Not in myself, but in the perspective of other people. That terrifies me.
SM: I interviewed Regé in a pub garden. A few months later, I'm going through the airport and he's on every other billboard...
MK: I've seen it happen with so many people around me. Which is a beautiful thing because it is a kind of success. I don't think it's the definition of success but it is a kind of success and it's beautiful to see.
I did a play called Dunsinane with Jeremy Irvine in 2010. Both of us were ensemble. The next thing he did, after basically playing a tree, was Warhorse for Steven Spielberg. Your life changes.
I saw it with John Boyega and Letitia and Damson [Idris] and Regé. Your life changes overnight and suddenly it's very different when you come out of the house. Seeing them navigate it has been helpful for me. I've been able to speak to them and go, 'What's that been like?' But that's also the thing that makes me go, 'I don't want to do that! [Laughs] That doesn't sound fun!'
SM: Did you get any advice from them?
MK: There's no point running away from it. You've got to be intentional about leading it so you don't become a victim to it. It's very easy to become a victim to fame and have it push you into a little hole in the corner. For the most part, just embrace it. And boundaries - it's different for everyone, but know what they are for you. Otherwise you can become very drained very quickly.
SM: It's OK to turn down a selfie, especially if you're having a bad day...
MK: It's like this polarisation of being very seen and also not being seen at all. They're not seeing you. They're seeing this physical appearance, this body, but they're not seeing you. People actually see you more when you're not famous: see in your heart, see in your soul, see someone as a human. You become famous and suddenly you've become invisible.
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As a teenager, Malachi Kirby ran. He started in secondary school and joined local club Belgrave Harriers. His distance was the 400 metres, his goal the 2012 Olympics. Over his first year of coaching, his PB dropped from one minute three seconds to 49 seconds. He was moving in the right direction, fast.
As his time came down, his acting took off. "Inevitably there was a choice that needed to be made," says Kirby. In the end it was made for him, as the steady stream of acting jobs ate into his training and made serious competition impossible.
Somewhere along the line he went from a runner who acted to an actor who used to run. It probably turned out for the best. "But I do miss running," he sighs. "It's not the same as a hobby."
SM: You need to be competing?
MK: Yeah. It wasn't just jogging around Battersea Park. It was being on the track, putting your spikes on, hearing the gun go off. There's something about the 400. Every time I ran it, I thought I was going to die. It was intense, physically draining. It's like the longest sprint. You reach that 300m mark and it's the last stretch and your legs have gone and there's nothing else in you but somehow you get to the end of it. There's something about that mentality of overcoming what you thought was your limit. It's not even adrenaline. I can't compare that feeling to anything else. I can't get it from jogging around the park.
SM: Can you get it from acting?
MK: Acting... [Pause.] I think it was Stanislavski who said there's a stupidly low percentage of actual truth - where you're not acting, you're not doing anything conscious. Where you are in a scene as the character but you reach a place of unconsciousness. Whatever you planned goes out the window and you are completely present and true. And I think he said, in any actor's career, that happens less than 10% of the time. If you can do more, then you are incredible.
SM: How often do you think you've reached that?
MK: I don't know. I feel moments though.
SM: The flogging scene in Roots?
MK: That was a moment. A moment that transcended myself - I don't even know if I was on this planet at that point. I feel like I went back in time, literally. I wasn't making decisions anymore. I wasn't trying to act. I wasn't conscious of character. I wasn't conscious of cameras. I was entirely present for a moment. That's the closest equivalent I can connect to that feeling I got at the end of the 400m.
And there's the other feeling. When you feel like you've just died but you see you've run faster than you ever did. You're running alongside people and it's different people, every time. That's one of the other lessons that I took: you've got to run your race. It's a staggered race so you've got other people in other lanes - some of them look like they're ahead of you, some of them look like they're behind you, and yet you might all be running the same pace. There are so many life lessons in running.
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SM: You still apply them now?
MK: For sure. Especially with acting. It's a big part of the reason why I don't see this career as competition. I've never gone up for any audition and felt like I was competing against anyone. I learned from the 400 that I'm competing with myself. My job is not to win the race, it's to get a PB.
Hopefully the PB will win the race but that's not the job. The job is to make sure I run faster than I ever did. That's the win. As long as you keep getting a PB, at some point you're going to be the fastest in the world if you keep going long enough. And it might not be that race, it might not be the next one, but the win is running faster than you ever did. With acting, I can't compete with other actors to get a job. For me, that doesn't even make sense.
There are parts I've done that if I had auditioned six months before or six months after, I probably wouldn't have got. They happened to come at a point where the character is resonating with me, and we've aligned at that moment; I have something to share and something to give. But life is happening at the same time. You move on, other experiences happen, your mind's in a different space, your energy's in a different space, and there's something else that you need to contribute.
SM: If you're only competing against yourself, why can't you find a buzz running around Battersea Park?
MK: There's something about it being documented. When you run a PB in competition, it becomes official. There's also something about running with people. Even though you're running your own race and you're in your own lane, there's something about the energy around you that pushes you on.
That's what my experience was like at drama school. I was in classes with all of these incredible artists who are doing so well right now. None of us were in competition with each other. Any time one of us got a job, we'd share it in the class. And I genuinely don't think any one of us thought, 'Oh man, why didn't I get that?'
We were first celebrating them, and then going, 'OK, it's possible. If you can do it, I can do it.' It would motivate me. It takes a special kind of person to grow and supersede yourself without anyone around you. To do that alone. I did a half marathon last year. The last 20 minutes, I didn't have my legs. They weren't there! And the only reason I didn't stop was everyone else. Everyone else doing it around you.
SM: I feel the same during a long tennis match - the only thing stopping me from quitting is the person across the net...
MK: There's a point in competition where it literally becomes spiritual. It's like my physical body has given up and something else takes over. And I believe that is spirit. A similar thing happens with acting: I do my prep, I do my training and then you get on set and something else takes over. I think that something else is spirit. It's not anything you could possibly create if you tried - or recreate. You just go somewhere else.
That unconsciousness I was speaking about, I believe it's spirit. That's the profoundness of it. That's the beauty of it. That's the truth of it. Exceeding your limits and your expectations. Sometimes I get a part and I'm like, 'How on Earth am I going to do this?' But you throw yourself in there and when you reach a point of spirit, there's a truth that comes out that is beyond your experience.
You share that and feel like you're freefalling. You come out of it and you go home and you sleep and you go, 'OK, something happened.' Don't know what it is. Don't know if anyone will ever see it. Don't know if they'll use that cut, but you know you gave something that passed through you. That's the win for me. That's the PB.
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During his interview with David Oyelowo, Kirby asked the older actor about their shared Christian faith. "We're both in Christ," said Kirby. "For me, it's something that I've come up against a lot - that question of 'Can I be a Christian and an artist and an actor?' Or does one have to suffer more than the other one?" It was a typically searching question and received a typically eloquent response.
Although he'd describe himself as a Christian, Kirby's own relationship with God is more spiritual than religious. "I go to church and I read my Bible and it's really important to me but I wouldn't describe it as being religious," he says. "The journey I'm on is definitely a spiritual one, but I wouldn't call it religious. I don't think I'd be acting if I was religious."
SM: How did you come to Christianity?
MK: I was in art class in year nine. Art class was one of the few spaces where the students were allowed to talk to each other - and so we'd have conversations. One time, someone asked me, 'Why do you celebrate Christmas if you're not Christian?' That's the first point I remember of asking questions about life, the bigger questions. It didn't make me go, 'I can't celebrate Christmas anymore!' but it made me ask, 'Why do I celebrate Christmas? What is Christmas? Who is God? Does God exist?'
I'd never considered it. I looked into different religions and I didn't have peace with any of them, not fully. I could take aspects, but the fullness of it I couldn't accept from anywhere.
This is going to sound crazy, but something happened, something shifted. I was very stubborn and I was like, 'If God is real, then I want to speak to him.' My life was all right. I didn't feel like I needed to change anything because I was happy. It wasn't from a space of desperation, it was just curiosity like, 'God, do you actually exist? If you are real, I want to interact with you. I don't want to do it in theory or do it in a book. I want to interact with you. And then it happened.
I had been trying to find proof of God's existence. One day I was in my bedroom, I was praying, I was trying to see so that I could believe, and I heard God speak to me. I don't know how to describe how he sounded. It wasn't like this big, booming Zeus voice. It was really gentle. But I heard him saying, 'You've been trying to see so you can believe, but you need to believe so you can see.' It was really simple. Something shifted and I opened my heart up.
It wasn't this big magical thing where the windows flung open. He revealed himself to me in that moment. Christ revealed himself to me in that moment. I was about 23 at the time and I couldn't doubt it anymore. I couldn't doubt him. I'd seen him, I'd experienced him. I didn't stop having questions, but I stopped needing answers.
Since then there's been a handful of big God moments where I'm like, 'What's happening? This is like a fantasy movie. But it's everyday life now. I'm just walking with him.' It is a very personal relationship that I have with him. Like I said, I go to church, but my interaction with God isn't confined to a building. I don't think it ever should be.
It has changed my life for sure, and it's the most important relationship in my life. It's not been a perfect journey. If anything, coming to know God has made me even more aware of my flaws, but not in a way that is condemning. I'm so aware of God's love. That's the key for me - his love. He is love and he will show me my imperfections, but also with that love on me and help me. Every day. It's been a beautiful journey.
SM: Final question - what would you say to the teenage Malachi if he walked through those doors right now?
MK: I would say to him that 'you're safe.' That's what I'd say. 'It's OK. You're safe.'
See A Thousand Blows on Disney+ from 21 Feb
