When war broke out in Somalia in 1991, Barkhad Abdi was six; overnight, Mogadishu changed from being a place where he was afraid to toss a rock, lest a passerby reprimand him, to one where killing and rape were normal. His mother evacuated the family, and they joined Abdi’s father in Yemen, where he was teaching math. Several years later, they immigrated to the U.S., settling in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, home to many expatriate Somalis. Abdi entered high school, learned English from Biggie, played basketball, and eventually got a job driving a Lincoln town car for his brother’s limousine company.
That’s what he was doing when he saw an ad for an open casting call at the local community center: Somalis needed for “Captain Phillips,” a film by Paul Greengrass, starring Tom Hanks, about the pirate attack on the cargo ship Maersk Alabama that took place in 2009. Abdi went. On a questionnaire that he was asked to fill out, he checked every “Yes” box, including the one next to “Can you swim?” He couldn’t.
Abdi tried out with three other men he knew from his apartment complex. He played Abduwali Muse, the nervy leader; Faysal Ahmed, a muscly fellow Abdi calls “the big guy,” was his ruthless second fiddle; Mahat M. Ali was the boat driver; and Barkhad (Little B) Abdirahman, the brother of one of Abdi’s friends, was the kid pirate. After the audition, they were flown to Los Angeles and learned from Paul Greengrass, over lunch at Shutters on the Beach, in Santa Monica, that they’d been cast. Abdi said, “He was, like, ‘All you guys in the movie! Now you have to be pirates. I’m not looking for actors.’ ” Abdi won a BAFTA for his performance, and was nominated for an Academy Award—a rare thing for a first-time actor. He may also be the only Hollywood star ever to have been arrested for possession of khat. (The charges were dismissed.) At the time of the film’s release, he didn’t even have an agent.
The other night, Abdi, who is five feet eleven and weighs a hundred and thirty pounds, was at the South Beverly Grill, in Beverly Hills. A black Lincoln town car like the one he used to drive was waiting for him. “Exact same color,” he said. It was nine, and he was carefully carving up a hamburger, the only thing he’d eaten all day. Earlier, at a dinner for Oscar nominees at Spago, he had been too nervous to eat. At an Academy luncheon at the Beverly Wilshire, he’d been too busy meeting people: Alfonso Cuarón, the director of “Gravity”; Christian Bale.
Between bites, Abdi talked process. To empathize with his character, he said, “I would think about where I woke up and where he woke up at. You don’t want to go back.” He went on, “I thought, What would you be like if you was there and you had nothing, you know?” (The real Muse is serving a thirty-three-year sentence in a federal prison in Indiana; his accomplices were shot dead by Navy SEALS.) Also, Abdi said, “I watch a lot of movies.” In spite of his family’s relative good fortune, working on the film returned him to his childhood. “That was the last time I had seen a real AK,” he said. As for the film’s iconic line, “I’m the captain now,” which Abdi delivers to Tom Hanks on the bridge of the ship, it was Abdi’s improvisation. “That was a message to Tom that I’m the lead,” Abdi said, revealing a set of very large teeth.
Abdi, who learned to swim, shoot, and steer a skiff, now finds himself in a predicament similar to Muse’s at the time of the film’s action: having improbably boarded the ship, he realizes that his grasp on power is tenuous, and he is still waiting for a payday. For his work on “Captain Phillips,” a fifty-five-million-dollar film, Abdi earned sixty-five thousand dollars. That was more than two years ago. After filming, he went back to work for his brother, selling mobile phones at his shop in a Somali-run mall in Cedar-Riverside. He shook his head and smiled. “How I thought about it was, like, When the movie came out, reviews either gonna be good or bad. Either way, I cannot be working here.” On the day of the première, he quit.
When Abdi is in Los Angeles to promote the film, he subsists on a per diem, good at the Beverly Hilton, where the studio likes to put him up. The town car is available only for official publicity events. His clothes are loaners. Recently, Abdi requested that he be allowed to stay at a commuter’s hotel near LAX, to be closer to his friend, a Somali cabdriver from Minneapolis, who shuttles him around for free. After the Oscars, Abdi plans to move to L.A. His roommate will be Faysal Ahmed, the big guy, who now has an agent, too. ♦
