BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE’s Sam Palladio on Playing Clash Frontman Joe Strummer, his Mystery Recording with Foo Fighters’ Chris Shiflett and More
One Love is a movie that carries an awful lot on its shoulders.
The life, politics and music of Bob Marley have almost dissolved into pop culture at this point, with the man himself’s name growing more synonymous with the concept of iconography itself by the day, and many forgetting too quickly the bold impact that Marley and his band of Wailers made simply by pouring love into music. The life and times of Bob Marley is intrinsic to our modern understanding of music as an art form today, and even in the face of a drudging sigh to the world of music biopics, One Love is taking a crack at reminding the people who knows Bob’s face to know Bob’s story.
The story, as might shock those who only know the face of reggae for the love baked into Bob Marley’s music, comes with its fair share of political turmoil — and it’s just this that brought Marley to punk icons The Clash. When Marley took to London in self-imposed exile after a vicious attack, his joining British culture led him into a show led by the band, whose political staunchness and musical fervor inspired the single “Punk Reggae Party,” drawing the two worlds together in a quiet moment of solidarity and camaraderie. One Love shows us this experience, too — and much of its impact comes courtesy of the film’s Joe Strummer, iconic guitarist, and by his own admission, “Punk Rock warlord. With Warlord being one word.”
Though Strummer plays a minor role in the film, his raucous, scrunch-faced demeanor was tough to replicate, his boots as the band’s frontman and leading voice an immense challenge to fill. Luckily for Sam Palladio, One Love’s pick to embody the guitarist, it wasn’t his first rodeo. The actor had taken to those very large boots before. Appearing as Strummer in English actress/comedian’s Kathy Burke’s autobiographical Sky1 short film Little Crackers (2010), Palladio, in his first British television appearance, played the self-seriousness he often projected for comic effect. But there’s clearly more on the table with Palladio’s performance in One Love.
