"This Is My Brother In Real Life": Aaron Pierre And Kelvin Harrison Jr. Reflected On Their Friendship And The Importance Of Men Being Open With One Another

What type of prep did you do to perfect your character’s voice?

AP: I'll be honest, for me, there was an enormous amount of preparation in regards to the musical component of this. I was struggling. Lin Manuel Miranda got me there; thank you, sir. In regards to the voice, I felt so liberated because I'd never done it before, so I didn't have anything to refer to. I had to just throw myself in there. And I was trying things and failing a lot...a lot of failing...then you find moments of success, and you try and mind those moments of success.

KHJ: You crushed the singing, buddy. He crushes the singing. Wait till y'all see. I know most people only heard like 39 minutes, or something like that, or maybe 29 minutes, whatever. But when we get to that part, I'm telling you, it's a banger. It's gonna hit iTunes, Spotify, Tidal, maybe, I don't know, Beyoncé's in this movie. Everybody's gonna be like, "WHAT, you're telling me that's Rebel Ridge? You're telling me that's Green Lantern?

AP: Fingers crossed.

KHJ: No fingers crossed, boy, it's happening. It's happened already. Bro, it's in the books! Anyway, what I did, though, is I had a dialect coach. I've been using the same dialect coach since 2016. He's incredible. We worked on the accent and we tried to reference a lot of Jeremy Irons [voice of Mufasa in 1994's original animated film The Lion King]  at times. Barry tried to make sure it encouraged me not to try to do a copy-and-paste. I had to find my own voice in it. I referenced a little bit of Joffrey [Baratheon] from Game of Thrones. Ultimately, it had to come from me. My lion is my own. He's a little goofy. He's got a little bit of Ron Weasley in him, too, so it's a specific sound, but that was mostly me just prepping the voice. Then the work is we play, we come in, we read the lines, we do it to the best of our ability. They're going to change, most likely. Sometimes, I did scenes two or three times over again, and I have new ideas. So, it was really just an acting exercise at a certain point, and just keeping the instrument warm and flexible.