Via GQ.com:

Before he became the face of Star Wars, John Boyega was just some impossibly talented, humble, and exuberant kid from South London. Now he’s getting a bite with Harrison Ford and talking shop with Robert Downey Jr.—and he’s still humble. Exuberant, too! Anna Peele went to Boyega’s current South London home to hang with one of Hollywood’s least “Hollywood” stars.

A Stormtrooper lay in the sand, sealed in the white plastic shell of a uniform better suited for a climate-controlled area: like, say, a Death Star. This particular Stormtrooper had defected and crashed on the desert planet Jakku. It was the fiercely shielded first shot of the fiercely hyped first teaser of the fiercely anticipated first Star Wars movie in a decade, so no one without a Disney contract knew who or where this Stormtrooper was as he fought to get off the dusty ground of what was actually Abu Dhabi. The story behind that image in the The Force Awakens was less fierce, more…awkward.

“Every time I’d move, the plastic would pinch my armpits,” the Stormtrooper says a few years later, reminiscing in his South London apartment as he removes the Indiana Jones hat he’s been inexplicably wearing indoors, exposing the neat high fade atop his dense five-foot-nine frame. “I’d rolled onto my bum, pushed up with my arms, then got onto my knees, struggling to get my thighs up. The sand was moving, and it was a struggle. I was out of breath. It was hot as hell. But I got my back up. And then I came into shot.”

The Stormtroopers had been No One until The Force Awakens. Unnamed. Rarely heard. Then the Stormtrooper removed his helmet and became John Boyega.

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