Imagine this, a 2013 era John Boyega, auditioning multiple times for a character that would become FN-2187 aka Finn in The Force Awakens, called and asked to meet with director J.J. Abrams, and he only had £45.00 to his name. Speaking at last weekends Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo he recalled the moment when his bank balance almost zeroed out in order to meet his future director.
“I had been auditioning for so long, so I felt like he kind of took away my dignity a little bit,” Boyega said. “So I decided to pretend as if I was busy, you know, when you just pretend that you’re busy. ‘I got other stuff to do, J.J.,’ ” Boyega recalled. “He goes, ‘Where are you?’ And I said ‘I’m at this art show in Greenwich, mate. I’m very, very busy. Where are you?’ He goes, ‘Well, I’m in Mayfair and [at a] restaurant. Need to talk to you now. And we’ll talk about something important.’ ”
“And I go, ‘Okay, okay, I’m gonna be right there.’ At the time I had £45 in my account. It took £33 and 83p to get to J.J. Do the math,” he added.
Boyega said that when he arrived at the restaurant to meet Abrams, the filmmaker was seated in a closed-off section of the building.
“So I go in. Each step I took, I was nervous. I was like, ‘Okay, cool.’ You know, J.J. is a phenomenal, nice guy, and if he was to tell me I didn’t get the part, he would still feed me,” the actor continued. “And so I sat down and, J.J. just said, ‘Thank you so much for coming back. I know we’ve kind of [strained] you with this amount of auditions.’ At that time, I took it upon myself to try and get another audition and go like, ‘J.J., please. Look, I can audition again. I can do British, Scottish, Nigerian, whatever. And he goes, ‘You’re in [Star Wars].’ “
