Aussie actor practised accent on strangers to play young Obama in ‘Barry’

TORONTO – As he prepared to play a young Barack Obama on the big screen, Devon Terrell shed his Australian accent, altered his body language and started practising his part on strangers he met on the streets of New York City.

“Barry,” which premieres on Netflix on Friday, examines the life of the U.S. president back when he was still a confused student in his junior year at Columbia University.

“I would go onto the streets and practise it. It was that thing of just getting out of your comfort zone,” said Terrell, who at the time had never appeared in a feature film.

“If I could do it to a stranger and they could believe me, then I’m sure I could do it on set with an actor.”

Terrell said he was struck by how relatable Obama was in the film’s script.

“We weren’t trying to just throw something in your face and say ‘this used to be the president.’ It just felt like if you take out the name Barack Obama, it could have been anybody,” he said.

Terrell’s co-star, Anya Taylor-Joy, plays a white woman Obama starts dating from his political science class.

For Taylor-Joy, the film tells a universal story, despite its high-profile protagonist.

“I think everyone can connect to it,” she said. “I hope people leave feeling a little bit less alone, a little bit like, ‘Oh, so the most powerful man in the world felt the way that I felt, that I didn’t belong and I couldn’t find my scene.'”

That idea of being able to relate to a sitting president also appealed to film director Vikram Gandhi.

“When you’re 20 years old and you go to New York for the first time, it’s like everybody is a blank slate that is learning from that experience, and everybody at that time in their life is really trying to figure out who they are,” he said. “Also all the ideas about race that are happening in it are still extremely relevant right now.”

The film sees the young mixed-race Obama struggle to find his place in society, whether it’s at a Harlem house party or at a country club wedding. That period of time in his life turned out to be an important one, Gandhi said.

“This was a time where the birth of his consciousness is happening in college, after which he would decide he had a responsibility to African American culture and work in communities,” he said.

The film had a personal connection for Gandhi, who happened to also attend Columbia and live in the same neighbourhood Obama did in university.

“It was a time in my life where I was just trying to figure out a lot of things but because I lived on that block I just knew, well that’s the bodega that’s on the block,” Gandhi said.

“It’s a time when it was clear he was confronted with so many different options and there were so many different directions he could have gone in and I had the same experience. It felt natural that this was a story I could tell.”