“I feel a bit nervous,” confesses John Boyega, as he sits down in front of the camera. “Speaking about it could possibly help. I haven’t revisited this in a long time. Yeah, my heart is just beating.” The Attack the Block and Star Wars actor is talking in the opening scene of a new BBC Two documentary about the killing of 10-year-old schoolboy Damilola Taylor.
On 27 November 2000, Damilola was stabbed in the leg with a broken bottle and left to die in a concrete stairwell, attacked as he walked home from an after-school club at Peckham library in south London. It took six years and three separate trials at the Old Bailey, costing a total of £16m, to secure a manslaughter conviction. His death shocked the nation not only because he was so young, but because all the suspects were also children. Boyega was one of the last people to see Damilola alive. The pair had enjoyed a close friendship since Damilola’s move to the UK from Nigeria in August of that year.
Watching the film at a Bafta screening a few weeks before its premiere, it’s striking how young and vulnerable the 34-year-old actor looks as he talks about the death of his friend. Boyega is more often seen looking assured and confident, be that his impassioned, impromptu address to thousands of people at a Black Lives Matter protest in Hyde Park, posing for the Pirelli calendar, or portraying an African king in a Hollywood movie. Usually he stands tall, with broad shoulders supported by a proud stance. But in revisiting the memories of that day, it feels as if he has almost reverted to the eight-year-old child he was nearly 26 years ago when he found out his friend had died.
A couple of hours later I reconvene with him at BBC New Broadcasting House to discuss the show. In person, Boyega is unassuming, with a calm demeanour and a welcoming smile. He has just returned from a trip to New York fashion week and looks surprisingly fresh-faced for somebody who has not long stepped off a transatlantic flight.
Boyega is sitting comfortably with his father Samson, his mother Abigail and an older cousin. It’s a lively space – Boyega lives in Los Angeles now and I get the impression that everybody is excited to snatch a bit of time with him while he’s in London. We immediately get into a five-way conversation about the criminal proceedings around Damilola’s death. Everybody is talking at once.
The first trial collapsed after the judge ruled that the prosecution’s key witness was unreliable and there was controversy about items of crucial evidence that were excluded from the proceedings. The family closely followed all three trials – in the second, the jury failed to reach a verdict for two of the three defendants on a charge of murder – and there is a sense of frustration at the opportunities missed when it came to bringing the killers to justice.
“You would have thought the influence of the Stephen Lawrence case would have been way stronger, if they had actually learned something. It didn’t come across like that,” Boyega sighs. The police investigation was heavily criticised after it was found to have made a number of significant mistakes.
The whole Boyega family knew Damilola; but the actor has previously said very little about him in public. Boyega has worked consistently since his 2011 debut in sci-fi cult classic Attack The Block, including a gamechanging role as a lead in Disney’s Star Wars franchise. His most recent projects, The Woman King (2022) and They Cloned Tyrone (2023), were both critically acclaimed. He has said that his professional success is in no small part due to being inspired by the way Damilola lived his short life.
He has been deeply involved in the documentary. “The first time I watched a rough cut I was in my living room and it was bright out. Since then, we’ve been watching daily edits, y’know, on a phone, on a laptop, on a little TV. But viewing it in the cinematic setup hits different – it was an emotional hill to get over, seeing the film like that. I feel really impacted by it.” Throughout the 75-minute screening, crying and sniffling could be heard around the room. “It’s one of those films I wouldn’t watch multiple times because of my personal relationship to it, but it’s definitely a film I will refer to – when my child comes of age I will show him this film. You need to know the realities of your lineage.”
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On Damilola Taylor’s first day at Oliver Goldsmith primary school in Peckham, shortly after his arrival in the UK, a teacher assigned Boyega’s sister Grace to be his chaperone. She says in the documentary: “My teacher was like, ‘Grace, there’s a new guy and he’s from Nigeria and obviously you’re Nigerian so you understand the language – you can show him around.’” They became a trio, because Boyega and his sister were inseparable at the time.
“The only reason I was around him a lot was because I was always with my sister – I inherited Damilola,” Boyega tells me, laughing. “I stayed because I found him hilarious.”
His father chimes in with a poignant memory: “John don’t have many friends – at least not boys. John had girls surrounding him. And I remember asking, ‘John, why are you hanging around girls?’ and he said, ‘Dad, boys are dangerous – they’ll beat me up.’” At lunchtimes, the three of them would run around the playground together.
Boyega describes the day Damilola died as a transformational moment for him. “The psychological impact is something that definitely stayed with me, but now it’s expressed through appreciation. Every time I wake up and I’m here, I appreciate it.” He smiles as he says of talking to his friends: “I’ll tell my boys, ‘Hey, a bullet don’t look at you and be like, “You’ve done movies before,” and swerve you!’” As a child, though, his thoughts were less positive. “When I would hear that anybody had been stabbed or whatever, it just felt like it was getting closer and closer and that awareness became part of day-to-day life. I was very scared of that.”
Boyega was eight when Damilola was killed; he had previously thought that death “only happened to old people”. He was bewildered by it – “like when babies fall and everyone goes, ‘Oh my gosh!’ and then the baby [seeing the response] decides to cry? It was like that.” As the news sank in, he found it difficult to comprehend that bad things could happen to good people. “I was trying to compute what that meant. I thought about the practicality of it. The last breath. Does it hurt? I remember with Grace we would have conversations where I’d be like, ‘Do you think death is sleep?’ or, ‘Maybe they go for 20 years and then, they come back?’ It kept me up at night because I was just with the guy, y’know?”
In the aftermath of Damilola’s death, Boyega spent a lot of time at home in his bedroom. Sometimes friends would knock for him and he would tell his mother to relay the message that he didn’t want to go out. “The hand of death is influencing kids to kill kids. I’m like, ‘Damn, I’m a kid, let me stay where I feel the most safe.’ I had a home that granted extreme safety and my parents didn’t shy away from showing concern.”
This played out in many ways, including their choice for his secondary school. Instead of the options in their home borough, he was sent to Westminster City School – almost an hour away by bus. Was getting out of the area a response to Damilola’s death? Boyega’s father answers: “Before John says anything, I went to his teacher when he was going to secondary school and he said to me, ‘Mr Boyega, why do you have to choose Westminster?’ And I never said to him what I saw: that the environment here will corrupt this guy,” he says, pointing at his son. “I saw what was coming, that in the future this environment is going to be very, very dangerous.” This was in 2003. By the end of the decade, 188 teenagers had been murdered on the streets of London.
I direct the conversation back to Boyega. Did he have therapy back then? He lowers his chin and looks at me with a furrowed brow. What he appears to be conveying is there’s no such thing as therapy in an African household – especially not a 1990s African household. We both laugh. At this point I am conscious that my question could easily be construed as a criticism of his parents, who are sitting on the sofa opposite us in the suddenly quite claustrophobic room. We quickly move on.
Over the years there have been numerous documentaries focusing on various aspects of Damilola’s killing, from a 2002 BBC Panorama special to most recently one fronted by broadcaster Yinka Bokinni to mark the 20th anniversary of Damilola’s death. This latest project focuses much of the narrative on the 24 hours leading up to his killing.
We hear from a number of people who were critical to the investigation in its early stages, including the estate maintenance worker who first found Damilola as he lay bleeding in the stairwell. There were several months of discussions between Boyega and the director, Alex Thomas – who also directed the award-winning Sky Original documentary Bibaa and Nicole: Murder in the Park, about the 2020 killings of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman. “It fell to me to decide who was coming from my world to sit down and talk,” says Boyega. “That’s when I decided that Grace would be more appropriate to discuss Damilola than me because that was her direct friend – they were around the same age. And I think her perspective on it was quite important.”
That was the easy part. More difficult was deciding how to address the ecosystem of bullying and fear on the streets of Peckham that led up to and ultimately underpinned Damilola’s killing. In the final edit, much of this element of the storytelling is omitted.
It doesn’t go unnoticed. During a Q&A after the screening, a Bafta member in the audience queries the lack of backstory included about the lives of the two boys convicted of Damilola’s manslaughter. In August 2006, brothers Danny and Ricky Preddie were each sentenced to eight years in youth custody after the third trial. The questionner pointed out that the brothers appeared at the Old Bailey unattended by any family. “I’d love to know why you left that out,” they said, referring to the brothers’ troubled childhoods. It was well known that their single mother struggled immensely while raising them. The pair were eventually placed in a local authority children’s care home. “We did look at the option of interviewing the two brothers,” said Boyega, who explained a general concern within the team that it might be viewed as being too empathetic to the perpetrators. In the end, the decision was made not to approach them.
But Boyega agrees that some elements of their backstory do have a place in the narrative, in particular when it comes to the debate about how to end youth violence. “Family. Discipline,” he says decisively. “The fact that you don’t have an adult at home that holds you accountable is a very important thing, especially for boys. Especially for boys.” He repeats the last sentence a little slower to emphasise its importance. “But y’know, you could have two parents at home and the child still goes out and does what they need to do, so there’s obviously a more nuanced conversation. Even in the sense that someone showed you that they loved you, that they cared about what you did or whether or not you made a mistake. What that person [in the screening Q&A] said made me think about what it meant – that they didn’t have that. Not even a social worker.”
There’s an extended silence when I ask Boyega what was difficult about making the documentary. “Poverty,” he replies, eventually. He means it brought back memories of the poverty he experienced as a child. Growing up, he lived in a small flat on Sceaux Gardens estate just off Peckham Road, with both his parents and his elder sisters – Grace, who appears in the documentary, and Blessing, who generally keeps a much lower profile. His mother was a care worker and his father a Pentecostal minister. “I didn’t know I was poor until I was in year 7. When you’re super-young, you’re not really thinking about that. And then when you get to school, you start to see where you are in the food chain of life, and that’s when you start to compare yourself with other children and other kids.” The process of filming the documentary brought that world back into focus.
Boyega recalls being keen not to stand out for the wrong reasons in his first year at Westminster City School, and begging his mother to buy him a pair of Kickers. She took him to Barrie Howard, a shoe shop on East Street in Walworth – a strategic rite of passage for any south Londoner who hoped to survive the brutal transition from primary to secondary. But once he had the shoes he felt bad, because he could tell how much it cost her. “I never asked for Kickers from my mum again – I wore Clarks for the rest of school.” Recounting these memories, plus seeing the archive footage of Peckham and the burgundy Oliver Goldsmith school sweater, brought back the distinct feeling that he had so much less than many of his peers. “I did work hard to get out of that. In making this film I had to revisit who I used to be, and that bothered me.” The interviews took place while he was on location in the Isle of Skye making a supernatural horror movie, The Punishing, in which he stars alongside Cara Delevingne (it is currently in post-production). The surroundings served as a physical reminder of how far he’s come in life.
Boyega had some reservations about being involved in the project. His main concern was that he wanted to make sure that Damilola’s brother – Tunde Taylor, chair of the Damilola Taylor Trust – was happy with the way Damilola’s life is portrayed. “I’ve been in the public eye for a minute now and from my experience, you have to be very careful, because you don’t know which journalist is being stressed by an editor. You don’t know which person wants to grab a story and not use it with the right intentions. You don’t know if they’re gonna be respectful to the people who are really involved.” But he was reassured by meeting producer Nelson Adeosun, a childhood family friend, and fellow contributor Leroy Logan. Logan is the founder and former chairman of the Black Police Association, whom Boyega portrayed in the film Red, White and Blue, from Steve McQueen’s 2020 anthology series, Small Axe. The performance won him a Golden Globe award.
Settling down thousands of miles away from Peckham has inevitably changed Boyega’s relationship with the place that made him who he is. “South is still familiar, but if I go now, people have to guide me … it’s so, so different,” he says, referring to the gentrification of the area. For him, though, the heart of the place is in the people who remember what it was like when he was growing up. We do a little reminiscing about which legendary hangouts have survived. He is pleased to note that Bagel King is on the list.
Somebody pokes their head round the door to tell us we need to wrap up. Boyega’s on a tight schedule. I ask a final question. Tell me about your jewellery, I say, indicating towards his left hand. “Oh yeah, this is my wedding ring,” he says casually. “I’ve been married for coming up to two years now.” He doesn’t give any detail about his wife, but does say they had a small ceremony, joking that he got married the way Braveheart did, while miming the action of planting a sword in the ground. He continues by reaching to the deepest depth of his vocal range and bellowing, “Will you come with me?”
His eldest sister has now joined us and the room has erupted into a chorus of unrestrained laughter. I note that the ring he is wearing is different from the one he wears in the documentary. “Yeah, this is our very sentimental ring,” he says of the two-toned band. “This is the one we decided to pick up spontaneously because I just wanted the ring on my finger, so we went to Walmart to get this. It was a lovely trip to Walmart. Shout out, Walmart Canoga Park!” he laughs. I am surprised to learn that he didn’t have a traditional Nigerian ceremony. “I would love to have a wedding celebration. We both like the idea of celebrating something established, rather than celebrating the entry. And by then, we’ll have to shut Nigeria down!”
It occurs to me that the child he mentioned earlier in the conversation may not be hypothetical. Are you about to hard launch a baby, I inquire tentatively. “My baby’s on the way. We got a baby cooking.” And you said my son earlier – is that because you’re having a boy? He confirms this and that he also has a young stepson. “So, you know, my life is completely, completely fulfilled in terms of family. It’s been so nice with the timing.”
Getting used to the new dynamic away from the public eye has obviously served him well – and perhaps this is why he is now ready to speak publicly about his friendship with Damilola. “I do think it’s important to reach back and tell people the grounded realities of your origins, because it wasn’t until I knew the grounded realities of other people’s origins that I decided to pursue something more.” When thinking about the kind of father he wants to be, it’s all still sinking in. “Us being parents is funny! I just want to make sure I’m present, I’m consistent and full of love.”
These personal milestones explain why he’s been less visible in recent years. “I’ve tried to as much as possible – especially following periods when I’ve worked a lot – to de-centre my career. There have been certain moments when I’ve known that this is a time for family. Y’know, there’s stuff to do.” In this moment he’s clear that his purpose is to love his wife and sons and invest in the support system that he knows he is lucky to have had.
• Damilola: The Untold Story is on BBC Two and iPlayer from 5 October
