Camberwell-born actor John Boyega will feature in an upcoming BBC documentary about the final hours of his childhood friend Damilola Taylor’s life.
Damilola was stabbed in the leg and left to die in an apartment block stairwell on the North Peckham estate in 2000.
Damilola, who had recently moved to London from Nigeria, was on his way home from Peckham Library at the time.
The documentary, titled Damilola Taylor: The Last 24 Hours, will examine the final hours of Damilola’s life leading up to his death, according to the BBC.
It will explore the impact of the ten-year-old’s killing on those who knew him. Boyega and his sister Grace were among the last people to see Damilola alive.
Boyega will give previously unheard testimony along with family members and other close friends about the hours leading up to Damilola’s death and the impact it had on their lives.
The BBC said that Damilola’s story “has never been told through the experience of the young people who were living it at the time.”
The film aims to show “what it meant to grow up in an environment shaped by fear, bullying and the need to protect yourself – and how those pressures influenced the choices people made.”
Boyega, who grew up on the Sceaux Gardens estate, was eight when Damilola was killed.
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The Star Wars actor previously described how a poem read at Damilola’s funeral spurred him on to become a movie star.
In an interview with John Wilson on BBC Radio 4’s Last Word two years ago as part of a look at the life of Damilola’s father Richard Taylor who died in 2024, Boyega said:
“From the hours we left him in Peckham to the hours when I went home, and then the police were at our door and there was a whole investigation that we were involved in, was definitely life-changing for me, definitely altered my perspective,” he said at the time.
“Even though I was young, it was a shock to understand how mortality worked. To think that somebody as young as me could pass away in such a horrific way was hard for me to understand or comprehend.
“And I definitely think [his death] has shaped me through the years and just affected my perspective on certain things.”
He spoke about a poem that Damilola had written and which his father read at his funeral, about, “how far he wanted his dreams to spread”. It “gave birth to this mentality that I had”, Boyega said. “What is truly my dream? Do I have the guts to identify what my dream is? Am I too young to identify my dream and work towards it?
“And after reading that poem, I was just like, yeah, I have no excuse. I want to be a movie star.”
