How Pop Icon Prince Inspired Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s Performance In ‘Chevalier’

He might not be the obvious choice but flamboyant music and pop icon Prince turned out to be the perfect muse for Kelvin Harrison Jr. when he took on the role of legendary violinist-composer Joseph Bologne in the new biopic Chevalier.

“Stephen Williams, the director, told me right out of the gate that he was not going to make your traditional period piece,” the actor recalled. “He was like, ‘I’m going do my own thing with it,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know what that means, but I’m ready to go on the journey with you.'”

As soon as work started, the pieces quickly fell into place.

“When we discuss a character like Joseph, it’s about finding comparisons that feel familiar, so if he was supposed to be this rock star of the 1700s, who would match that? People said that he felt like an enigma, androgynous, flamboyant, kind of cocky, women loved him, and he was five feet six. There were all these things, and it was like, ‘Well, who was this?’ The answer was Prince.”

Rather fittingly, Chevalier lands in theaters on Friday, April 21, 2023 – the seventh anniversary of Prince’s death.

Set in France, Chevalier tells the story of Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the illegitimate son of an enslaved person and a French plantation owner, who was a brilliant musician and fencer, among many other things. He quickly became celebrated in French high society. He stole the hearts of women and ruffled the establishment’s feathers, all while trying to achieve his dreams and creating a celebrated catalog of work. However, much of that was erased from history and took hundreds of years to reclaim.

As well as contemporary comparisons and influences, Harrison Jr. and the film’s director discussed stopping the dialect from being “too stuffy.” It raised as many questions as it provided answers.

“We weren’t going to it in a French accent, so if everyone’s going to have a bit of an English accent, how does Joseph feel different from everybody else?” he mused. “How much of my voice do I use? How much do we demonstrate the assimilation to this culture? It became about representations rather than complete authenticity to what the moment was. That could have been a snooze fest.”

Harrison Jr. knew from the get-go that a period piece about a classical musician might look and feel inaccessible to some. He wanted to make it as appealing as possible to the reticent.

“Movies, especially right now, if you’re going to make a big studio movie about Joseph, it’s for the people, so why would you make art that the people won’t understand, want to be entertained by, or felt connected to?” the actor asked. “They should feel like it is for them, so, yes, the storylines and the circumstances are of the time, but the characters are of our time in some ways.”

Getting Chevalier to where it reflected those elements took a lot of work, which Harrison Jr. witnessed in real-time.

“Stephen and our writer, Stefani Robinson, went through so many different drafts of the script. I remember seeing a few of them,” he recalled, laughing a little. “To be honest, I signed on, and we were a few months into prep, and then I’d get another script and then another one and so on, so it was constantly evolving for the better.”

The actor said it “needed to be concise and clear” and “show a man on a journey and trying to figure out who he was in the society.”

He continued, “In Joseph, we wanted to see a man who was relating to characters that were dealing with the patriarchy, misogyny, racism, dealing with feeling like an immigrant at times, Marie Antoinette, and kind of stepping into worlds where they’re like, ‘We’re other,” while using what they had in front of them for their advantage. Ultimately, all of them are very selfish, and sometimes we move like that as people.”

Harrison Jr. is a talented musician in his own right, but he had to work hard to get to the standard and style required for the performance.

“The dexterity wasn’t there,” he admitted, having not played for years. “I didn’t have the same stretch, and my fingers wouldn’t move as fast as they used to. However, they never moved as fast as I had to do for this.”

“At the same time, I think there was an understanding of how to hold and command the violin, but that was about it. It took a minute. The good news about it sounds more impressive than it is. It’s chromatic, pentatonic, and major scales. You know where you’re going and tend to sit at the same point. Some of the high notes sound impressive, but they’re all right there.”

The actor had an intense training process that included drafting in his father, a classical music teacher.

“I had five months of practice. I did seven days a week, six hours a day,” he explained. “When we started shooting, we did ten-hour days. I would leave and do an hour of fencing, and then my violin teacher would meet me at my apartment, and we would do two hours of practice. After all that, then I would learn my lines.”

One of the finest examples of Harrison Jr.’s nimble fingering is in Chevalier‘s powerhouse opening scene, where Bologne and another violinist face-off, battling and playing fiercely against each other. It was painful but worth it.

“Were my fingernails filled with blood? Yes,” the actor concluded. “I was doing this all day, every day, and it’s not like we were playing a beautiful melody; it was intense. I was exhausted, but we worked for months to get to that day, so we would put everything into it. That day I felt like I was in game mode, and it paid off.”