#Captin phillips guy driver#

It was nine, and he was carefully carving up a hamburger, the only thing he’d eaten all day. A black Lincoln town car like the one he used to drive was waiting for him. The other night, Abdi, who is five feet eleven and weighs a hundred and thirty pounds, was at the South Beverly Grill, in Beverly Hills. (The charges were dismissed.) At the time of the film’s release, he didn’t even have an agent. He may also be the only Hollywood star ever to have been arrested for possession of khat. I’m not looking for actors.’ ” Abdi won a BAFTA for his performance, and was nominated for an Academy Award-a rare thing for a first-time actor. Abdi said, “He was, like, ‘All you guys in the movie! Now you have to be pirates. After the audition, they were flown to Los Angeles and learned from Paul Greengrass, over lunch at Shutters on the Beach, in Santa Monica, that they’d been cast.

#Captin phillips guy driver#

Ali was the boat driver and Barkhad (Little B) Abdirahman, the brother of one of Abdi’s friends, was the kid pirate.

He played Abduwali Muse, the nervy leader Faysal Ahmed, a muscly fellow Abdi calls “the big guy,” was his ruthless second fiddle Mahat M. On a questionnaire that he was asked to fill out, he checked every “Yes” box, including the one next to “Can you swim?” He couldn’t.Ībdi tried out with three other men he knew from his apartment complex. That’s what he was doing when he saw an ad for an open casting call at the local community center: Somalis needed for “Captain Phillips,” a film by Paul Greengrass, starring Tom Hanks, about the pirate attack on the cargo ship Maersk Alabama that took place in 2009. Abdi entered high school, learned English from Biggie, played basketball, and eventually got a job driving a Lincoln town car for his brother’s limousine company. Several years later, they immigrated to the U.S., settling in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, home to many expatriate Somalis. His mother evacuated the family, and they joined Abdi’s father in Yemen, where he was teaching math.

When war broke out in Somalia in 1991, Barkhad Abdi was six overnight, Mogadishu changed from being a place where he was afraid to toss a rock, lest a passerby reprimand him, to one where killing and rape were normal. Barkhad Abdi Illustration by Tom Bachtell