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‘He’s the party starter!’ Daniel Kaluuya and Kano on friendship, football and their new film

The Oscar winner – and now director – and the rapper and Top Boy star Kane Robinson are longtime friends. Their new movie, the dystopian thriller The Kitchen, draws on their city childhoods

Robinson, whose last two albums, 2016’s Made in the Manor and 2019’s Mercury-nominated Hoodies All Summer, received extensive critical acclaim, spent 2018 to 2023 playing main man Sully in possibly the most influential UK TV series of recent years, Top Boy. He hadn’t found that in football: “I was decent at it, but the same level of passion wasn’t there.” With music, he woke up thinking about it, and it taught him self-sufficiency: saving money to pay for an hour in a mixing studio, then playing the track out on Deja, and if it worked, maybe pressing a hundred records, taking them to shops, sale or return… When he talks about this time, he lights up. Music and film and football, a bit, though Robinson doesn’t care about it much any more, and Kaluuya, a huge Arsenal fan, can’t watch matches, because he gets too wound up… And then the time is up, and they have things to do, and they laugh their way out of the room, which feels frou-frou and curly and quiet and boring, after they leave.

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