Ben Bailey Smith

"I was riding my bike, and I just stopped and started laughing. I couldn't believe it. It would be a big job regardless for an actor, but I'm a Star Wars maniac. I love Star Wars and have since I was a little kid. Return of the Jedi was the first movie I ever watched in the cinema. My relationship with Star Wars is lifelong. Being in it is a dream come true."

―Ben Bailey Smith, describing his reaction at being told that he had been cast in a Star Wars series^[1]

Ben Bailey Smith, also known by his rapper alter ego Doc Brown, is a British actor, screenwriter and rapper^[1] who played Blevin in the 2022 Andor television series.^[2] He is the brother of the famous novelist Zadie Smith.^[1] As an actor, he is best known for playing Joe Hawkins in the British police procedural series Law & Order: UK and Nathan Carter in the comedy drama series 4 O'Clock Club.

Smith originally auditioned for the role of young Lando Calrissian for the 2018 film Solo: A Star Wars Story, a part which ultimately went to Donald Glover. In 2020, he did a casting for what he was lead to believe was a military drama called Pilgrims, and was told that his role was "a sergeant major chewing out some soldiers." A few days later, he was told that he had gotten the job and that the project was actually Star Wars.^[1]

Due to studio secrecy, Smith was only given the script for his own scenes, with the context being explained to him on the shooting day. The scripts were titled Pilgrims and false names were put up on the dressing rooms. The daily production sheets were also fake. To keep drones from photographing them, the actors had to wear large cloaks when walking from their dressing room to the set. Smith struggled with the lines, which were full of sci-fi language, names of fictional planets, and fictional laws, and didn't know what the character was actually talking about. According to the actor, "One day I was delivering a line and the director came over. He's like, can we do it again with a bit more urgency? Because this planet is about to explode. And I was like, is it? I didn't know. Now I know what's going on."^[1]