3 weeks ago
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For Deshawn Miller, chef at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel, playing the part of a male star-lead, student and food vendor in the Jamaican movie Romeo n Juliet 4EVA was an easy task.
It was the exact life Miller was living seven years ago before casting. He loved cooking and was pursuing culinary studies in school. He lived at the exact location where the shop and home scenes were shot for the movie, and the cook shop was owned by his parents whom he worked with on weekends. Therefore, acting the role of a young boy with a sick mother, and having to operate a cook shop at night in his yard, was a no-brainer for him.
“This is something I had been doing a long time ago in the back of our yard. I used to work there on a Friday with them, so once I left high school, I went straight to HEART/NSTA Trust, and after that, I went to The Jamaica Pegasus where I cook and I [also] now have my own catering business, Rafeal Artistic Pastries,” Miller told The Gleaner during an interview after the private viewing of the movie Romeo n Juliet 4EVA for specially invited guests on October 1 at Palace Cineplex in Sovereign, Liguanea.
Grateful for the experience, Miller was proud to see himself on screen. “[I] was looking up and I was like, ‘A me that? Loverboy!’ Loverboy at his best, and I am grateful for the experience, to be honest, because I’ve been sitting and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting, and I’m like, ‘This naago possible. Let’s just stick to the chef career’ but bwai, when mi get this, mi can’t go walk a road again,” Miller said before bursting into laughter.
Didn’t know this day would come
Just as Miller, Shanice Gowans, who played his co-star as the Juliet character, shared that she didn’t know this day would come. She said back then it seemed like a simple school project for students at Haile Selassie High School where they were students at the time.
“I feel really good about it. I had my doubts [about] it coming to fruition. Now seeing it on screen coming together with me, a 14 and 15-year-old teenager at the time, I really loved it. I loved the way it came together, even though, at the time, I did cringe and had some insecurities about it, I love it in the end,” Gowans, who now works as a billing agent at a call centre, told The Gleaner.
“For me, playing Juliet, wow, it was at the time, a roller coaster, because I had to be giving off this energy and these emotions that I’m not used to, [such as] falling in love and making it my world, and watching me on the screen, yes, I cringed a bit, but I loved the most of it,” she said.
The story behind Haile Selassie High students being cast is one worth telling. The producer, Paul Bucknor, hosted a local Shakespeare Schools’ Championship, and though Knox College won that year, availability led to the students of Haile Selassie High School, who placed third, taking the spotlight.
The main characters of Romeo n Juliet 4EVA were students of Michael Forest, a teacher at the school and the man behind the training for Miller, Gowans and others.
What the duo, Miller and Gowans together, love about the movie, is that it will put their alma mater, Haile Selassie High, on the international map.
“Haile Selassie, you can go there, and with the right mindset, you can go far. So, if there are any students watching from Haile Selassie, I did it, so you can do it too,” Gowans told The Gleaner.
Now that she has been featured in a film that has been played in the United Kingdom, Gowans sees this as an opportunity for her to expand her career in acting.
“[Five] years from now, I see myself using my theatre arts experience, so if this movie should promote me in a positive light, I believe that I could be acting professionally. I’m not putting any boundaries on it. I [could] be acting,” she said.
“The movie made me feel like we really had something going on. It felt [like] real [love]. It was very real and I would like Jamaicans to come out, spend yuh money, buy yuh good clothes fi come watch it because this is something you have to watch,” Miller told The Gleaner.
The Shakespearean classic has already received a sold-out special during a Jamaica Independence Day screening at Brixton’s Ritzy Cinema on August 6. At the time, the film was not finished being edited.
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