O-T Fagbenle has a message to former president Barack Obama, whom he portrays in the upcoming Showtime series “First Lady,” set to premiere April 17: “Barack, call me.”
Fagbenle discussed his upcoming turn as the 44th president, alongside Viola Davis’ Michelle Obama, at the premiere of Apple TV Plus’s “WeCrashed” on Thursday at the Academy Museum. But did he try to contact President Obama to prepare for his role?
“I did try and get in contact with him, of course!,” Fagbenle said. “This is what happened: Viola knows Michelle, and Viola had been chatting to Michelle, so I was like, ‘Yo, ViVi, yo, help me out, bro, you got a hook up!’ So she put me in contact with the personal assistant of the president, and I’m like, I’m in. Yo, me and B are gonna play a bit of golf together.”
But once it came down to actually corresponding with the former president, Fagbenle’s excitement was slightly dimmed. He continued, “I said, ‘Look I’m filming in three months, can we chat?’ And I got a message back saying — lovely message — ‘Barack would love to, but he’s booked up.’ He’s booked up for three months? Just say you don’t wanna see me, bro. Just say you don’t want to see me.”
The Emmy-nominated British actor also spoke about embodying the president, whom Fagbenle said he “really, really studied” in order to play the very well-known figure.
“If you’re playing Lincoln, no one knows what Lincoln was like. But even if you’re playing Nixon, how many people can really recognize that Nixon hand movement?,” Fagbenle said. “But Barack Obama came alive during the social media movement, he’s one of the most recognizable people, so [the challenge was] finding a way of playing a character, discovering a character and not doing an imitation, but at the same time doing enough that people aren’t like, ‘Who the hell’s that guy playing?'”
He continued, “It was very hard… Playing him over the span of 15 years is a challenge, as well, but it was a beautiful challenge.”
Fagbenle wore prosthetics to capture Obama’s signature ears: “They gave me prosthetics that were his size, but they looked too big on my head so they actually had to give me smaller ears than he has to make it look realistic.”
The Handmaid's Tale star O-T Fagbenle plays President Barack Obama in Showtime's limited series The First Lady. See the lengths he went to in order to get the performance just right.
By Daniel Trainor Apr 06, 2022 9:33 PM
Gabrielle Union & More Celebrate Barack Obama's 60th Birthday Talk about sounding presidential! O-T Fagbenle, who plays President Barack Obama in the upcoming Showtime limited series The First Lady, knew he had big shoes to fill, but none of it would matter if he couldn't that famous voice down. "[Obama] came at the beginning of social media, he was the first social media president. And so it's a really big challenge to play someone who's so well known and not feel like you're doing [an] imitation of them," Fagbenle told Tamron Hall on April 6. So, The Handmaid's Tale actor went to great lengths to make sure he got it right. "There's a whole technical aspect to it, studying dialect and movement and I had some great support, some great coaches," he said. "Some great friends who helped me out with that." However, Fagbenle—who is British!—also knew that there's much more to the 44th president than his voice.
"On a deeper level, it's almost like a painter isn't trying to do a photograph of a scene. They're trying to do their impression, their expression of it," the actor told Hall. "I was trying to find his heart, like what's at the core of him. He's such a remarkable individual, he has such love for his family, such intellect, such charisma. It was really trying to get to the heart of the man that was the challenge."
When it came to trying to gain some personal insight from the former President himself, however, Fagbenle says he got the cold shoulder. After being put in touch with Obama's personal assistant, things didn't go according to plan.
"I said, ‘Look I'm filming in three months, can we chat?,' Fagbenle told Variety. "And I got a message back saying—lovely message—‘Barack would love to, but he's booked up.' He's booked up for three months? Just say you don't wanna see me, bro. Just say you don't want to see me."
The First Lady stars Viola Davis, Gillian Anderson and Michelle Pfeiffer, who play former First Ladies Michelle Obama, Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Ford, respectively. The series interweaves the stories of three of the most influential women in White House history.
The First Lady premieres April 17 at 9 p.m. on Showtime.
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The particular difficulty of portraying Barack Obama is that his entire presidency has been documented on the internet. Every speech and every public moment was put on display in real time for the world to see.
So, people are intimately familiar with the idiosyncrasies that make him, well, Barack Obama. And there hasn’t been an actor who has taken on the challenge of embodying him throughout his entire time in office, until now.
“This is kind of like the first extensive portrayal of Barack,” O-T Fagbenle, who gives an uncanny performance as Obama in Showtime’s “The First Lady,” told TheWrap. “So it kind of felt like freshly trodden ground, which to be honest, is somewhat of a relief. I mainly focused on the footage of him, which is readily available. In some ways, the extent of the footage of him is both a wonderful tool, but it’s also a big challenge because people are so aware of the specificity of his speech.”
“The First Lady” tells the story of three influential women who have inhabited the White House — First Ladies Michelle Obama (Viola Davis), Betty Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson). As such, the presidents take a supporting role.
Not only was he tasked with portraying one of the most recognizable presidents in American history, but he also had fewer moments to make an impact. That meant Fagbenle had to get a bit creative.
“I started listening to a lot of his impersonators, because what impersonators do is they kind of a lot of times hook on to the most idiosyncratic parts of someone’s speech patterns, someone’s idiolect, and exaggerate them and do them over and over,” he explained. “And so that was a useful starting point for someone who knew nothing about how to do a specific person’s idiolect. I actually reached out to a couple of his impersonators who gave me some tips, and then as I became better and more accustomed to the act, I started working with actual dialect coaches and getting into the nuances of the nitty gritty.”
What pieces of advice did these impersonators give him?
“One of them is really listening to the pauses that Barack takes and where he takes them. The other thing is … he can go slow at the beginning and then get really fast at the end,” Fagbenle said. “I think also his voice placement is a very particular thing. And that took a long time to try and feel comfortable within my own physiology.”
But Fagbenle wasn’t simply tasked with doing a singular impersonation of the 44th president. Instead, he had to hone in on Obama’s specific tendencies throughout the eight years that he was in office.
“My God, all the challenges, because, you know, his voice subtly changes over time. The way he moves his body very subtly changes over time,” he said. “And also, I think … he gets a little bit more grounded, perhaps a little more, you know, you can see — they say heavy lies the crown — you can see the weight of the office on him. And so, finding a way to kind of navigate those subtle changes without kind of doing broad impressions.”
In addition to learning from impersonators and a dialect coach, he also turned to someone whose impression of a real-life person he has long admired.
“I think David Oyelowo’s Martin Luther King, I just thought that was extraordinary. I loved that and was really inspired by that. And in fact, I called him up to ask for some advice, and he was very generous with his time around that.”
Another actor’s embodiment of a historical figure that he studied was Denzel Washington as Malcolm X. That performance “was seminal to me in my adolescence,” Fagbenle said.
However, the actors didn’t get to connect about their roles just yet. Fagbenle joked: “I’ve never met him, if you can arrange it.”