There is something about my face that makes people want to see me cry,” says 36-year-old Malachi Kirby, who has made a career out of brooding and breaking down in shows like Black Mirror, Roots and Small Axe. Looking at him now, his robust cheekbones and robust-er jaw, I wonder why that might be. Probably there’s something about seeing immovable strength undone by a stroke of sadness – like watching a trickle carve itself into the side of a mountain and become a raging river.
“It’d be nice to actually have fun on set for once,” Kirby laughs, giving a quick flash of pearly teeth. We’re speaking in a suite in an upscale London hotel; he’s on the sofa, grazing on a bowl of nuts. For now, fun will have to wait. Kirby’s role opposite Stephen Graham in A Thousand Blows as Hezekiah Moscow, an aspiring boxer from Jamaica trying to survive in the dingy underworld of 1880s London, is many things – brutal, thrilling, fresh – but it is not a barrel of laughs.
