Kingsley Ben-Adir had to be forced to audition to play Bob Marley in One Love

Bob Marley biopic One Love certainly looks like a Bob Marley biopic—take from that what you will—but while the whole “musician biopic” genre has been getting a lot of attention over the last few years (both commercially and during awards season), One Love star Kingsley Ben-Adir really had to be convinced to take on the starring role. In fact, it kind of seems like director Reinaldo Marcus Green (in his follow-up to King Richard) had to force him to do it.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Ben-Adir said that he had “a lot of reservations” about auditioning for the movie when the opportunity first presented itself, saying he was “completely convinced” that he didn’t have a chance because, as he noted, “I can’t sing. I can’t dance.” He also apparently asked if the producer had already done a “worldwide search” before coming to him, and when they said that they had, he suggested that they “should go on another one.”

Eventually, partially thanks to an endorsement from Ziggy Marley, Ben-Adir conceded and agreed to make an audition tape. He said he spent a weekend obsessing over Marley and, wouldn’t you know it, he got the part. Ben-Adir told EW that he took singing and guitar lessons for the movie, and he sang all of the songs himself during filming, but the finished film reportedly “blends his voice with Marley’s archival recordings” (often an… interesting choice in this kind of movie). He also “recruited Jamaicans” to come over to his house (Ben-Adir is British) and help him parse the audio from Bob Marley interviews so he could get the voice right, leading to him compiling “hundreds of pages of Bob speak, written out phonetically,” and he did a lot of his Marley research while on the Barbie set.

We’ll see if all of this was worth it when One Love (which also stays Lashana Lynch) comes out in February.