If you’re going to play Barack Obama – the first black man to become United States president; a man whose departure from the White House leaves the world divided and in turmoil; a role you’ve dreamed about since you were in high school in Perth, Australia, watching his inauguration speech – you’re going to want to do your homework.

For Devon Terrell – an Australian actor who, remarkably, had no screen credits to his name when he landed the role in Netflix’s new biopic, Barry – it became something of an obsession.

“I get addicted to this kind of research,” the 24-year-old says, in Sydney for a press tour ahead of the film’s release. “I read [Obama’s memoir] Dreams from My Father three times, and kept reading it afterwards as well. I just wanted to understand who he was as a young man.”

Based only on public record research material (with liberties taken here and there), the unauthorised biopic covers a year in the president’s early life: 1981, when the young Barack Obama arrives at Columbia University as a chain-smoking transfer student, struggling to work out exactly where he fits and who he wants to be.

Terrell had only a couple of months to prepare for the film, which was shot in less than six weeks. A perfectionist, he learned to write and play basketball with his left hand like Obama (in the film, it’s on the basketball court where Barry first feels at home in New York). Terrell also had to master the accent, learn how to hold himself like the future president and effectively develop his own version of one of the world’s most famous men – a performance the film-makers wanted to be more homage than impersonation.

He also had to lose weight. “Obama is long and lanky ... I had to find the lankiness,” Terrell says. “I actually had to lose about six to eight kilos in two months, because I was quite – I’d been going to the gym.”

‘Obama is long and lanky ... I had to find the lankiness’: Devon Terrell as a young Barack Obama in Barry. Photograph: Linda Kallerus/Netflix

Obama’s mother is American, his absent father is Kenyan, and he grew up between Indonesia and Hawaii; the New York he arrived in in 1981 was crime-ridden, racially divided and glaring in its inequality. In the film, his boorish, drug-addled roommate Will (Ellar Coltrane) describes him as “just white enough”; as Barry himself puts it, “I fit in nowhere”. It’s a tension that becomes magnified when he starts dating Charlotte (Anya Taylor-Joy) – a character composite of three white women Obama dated in his first year at Columbia.

Written by Adam Mansbach and directed by Vikram Gandhi of Vice – who studied at Columbia after Obama had graduated and lived next door to the building Obama had moved in to – the film is sweet, thoughtful and compelling, if occasionally undercooked in the plot department. It premiered to wide acclaim at Toronto Film Festival this year, drawing favourable comparisons to another Obama biopic, which was set a decade later, but released a few months earlier: Southside With You.



Terrell was “super excited” when he heard about the role in Barry – just after he discovered that an HBO series he’d been working on with Steve McQueen, Codes of Conduct, had been cut after the pilot. The opportunity to even audition as Obama was enough to salve that disappointment; it was the role he had always wanted.



He recalls: “When I was studying at Nida [the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney], my older cousin sat me down and said, ‘What’s your goal?’. And I said, ‘My life goal is to play Barack Obama, that’s it’. I just idolised the man growing up. He was somebody I wanted to be like.”

Terrell had a lot to draw from. Born in the US to an Anglo-Indian mother and an African American father, he moved to Perth, in Western Australia, when he was a young child. “There are no other African American Anglo-Indians there, I can tell you that!” he says with a laugh. Although he’s not a dead ringer for the young president, he’s not far off.

“Racism was never really an issue in my life, but I was always code-shifting as a young man,” he says. “I had to switch my accent from American to Australian – I became very ocker; very, ‘Hey how ya goin’ – but Nida slapped that out of me. I think that’s kind of why I became an actor – because I was so used to putting on different masks as a young man.”

While Terrell can serve up a convincing impersonation of the president (and is happy to prove it), he wanted Barry to be a stand-alone character. There are some recognisable tics there – the stutter, the voice, the way he purses his lips while deep in thought – but there’s also a lack of surety, a vulnerability, the self-conscious unease that comes with youth. The Guardian’s Jordan Hoffman described his performance as one with “striking depth”.

“Obama is everywhere, you know, so I just had to block him out of my brain,” Terrell explains. “I didn’t watch TV; I just watched and rewatched a 56-minute clip of him when he was younger.” That Obama, speaking about Dreams from My Father to a Cambridge audience in 1995, had poise – but also a charming lack of confidence. “I just imagined – I said, ‘If that’s him at 30, at 21 he was not assured at all’,” Terrell says.

From that clip, Terrell learned how to speak like Obama: “His accent kind of whirls in the air; it’s kind of ethereal, the way he speaks. He doesn’t say what he needs to say until the end of his sentences ... and he’s never someone to jump on an emotion.” In one scene in Barry, a gun is pulled on the young Obama. “He doesn’t react; he’s kind of, ‘How am I going to work my way around this situation?’ He’s a very methodical thinker.”

The enormity of an unknown actor from Perth landing this particular role at this particular time is not lost on Terrell, who admits he was initially “daunted” by the prospect. But on the eve of the film’s global release, the young actor is just looking forward to getting it out there.

“My family is absurdly excited – like, they’ve never been so excited,” he says with a laugh. “I’m sure my mum’s going to have Netflix on every day now. She’s obsessed.”

• Barry launches on Netflix at 7pm AEST on 16 December