The new Barbie film, directed by Greta Gerwig, is appropriately stacked with Jewish actors. Given that the Barbie doll’s creator, Ruth Handler, was a Jewish woman, it is only fitting that a handful of the Barbies and Kens populating the film’s technicoloured Barbieland come from Jewish backgrounds.
London-born Kingsley Ben-Adir is one such Ken. Raised Christian by his Trinidadian mother and European father, he later converted to Judaism with his mother and brother, changing his surname to the Hebrew Ben-Adir, which means “son of the strong or mighty”.
Ben-Adir has lived up to the name, playing a host of “strong and mighty” characters throughout his acting career.
In the 2020 film One Night in Miami, directed by Regina King, Ben-Adir played the role of Malcolm X with a performance that earned him an Oscar nomination. Also in 2020, he played Barack Obama in the American political miniseries The Comey Rule on Showtime. The projects overlapped, about which Ben-Adir told GQ, “It turned into a non-stop 40-day Malcolm/Obama thing, and I just had to jump from one headspace to another. I really ran myself into the ground, but in a way that I loved.”
Though his role as Ken in Gerwig’s Barbie seems to represent a lighthearted departure from the heady performances of prominent real-world figures, Ben-Adir is only demonstrating his versatility; in 2024, he will play the part of Bob Marley in an upcoming Paramount biopic about the reggae legend.
But the actor, 37, didn’t start out playing leading characters. At 21 he enrolled in drama school, after starting his career as a special education teacher at a secondary school in London. His acting career kicked off with several theatre productions from 2011, and in 2014 he first turned heads on the big screen with his portrayal of Dr Marcus Sumner in the ITV British crime drama Vera.
From 2017-2019, Ben-Adir worked alongside Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy in the fourth and fifth seasons of the acclaimed British period drama Peaky Blinders, playing the part of Colonel Ben Younger.
Another of his latest roles attests to his shape-shifting powers as an actor. Marvel Studio’s Secret Invasion, which came out on Disney+ on June 21, sees Ben-Adir playing Gravik, a blood-thirsty extraterrestrial and the main antagonist of the series. During an interview with GameSpot, Ben-Adir compared Gravik against his role in Barbie: “The Ken that I play is like a seven year old boy who doesn’t like violence, loves everyone, and he’s a child. And I think Gravik is a sociopath.”
By degrees, Ben-Adir has been proving his ability to act in roles that vary from comedic to dramatic, innocent to evil.
In Barbie, we get to know Ben-Adir as a ditzy, double-entendre-slinging Ken. And onset he is among Jewish company: actors Ariana Greenblatt, who plays Sasha, Hari Nef, and Ana Cruz Kayne - both playing Barbies - are Jewish, too.
In a Warner Bros interview on the set of Barbie, Ben-Adir called his time on the film “the most joyful working experience of my life.”
