Daniel Kaluuya took opera lessons to perfect his voice as Black Panthers leader

Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya took opera singing lessons to help him prepare for speech scenes in his new Black Panthers movie Judas & the Black Messiah.

The Brit plays Panthers leader Fred Hampton in the powerful film and needed to prepare for a series of sequences in which he had to speak like a passionate revolutionary to crowds of followers without losing his voice, so to strengthen his vocal range he tried a little opera therapy.

"I had to condition my vocal chords and engage my diaphragm, because I'd be doing speeches for, like, 12 hours," he told Good Morning America. "Like any muscle, you need to get it strong in order for you to sustain that, in order not to do permanent damage to it," the actor went on.

"I also had to study cadence, because Chairman Fred Hampton had a different cadence to when he spoke and when he did speeches and I wanted them to feel different but feel like the same person at the same time," he shared.

Elsewhere in the interview, Kaluuya related the themes in Judas & the Black Messiah to current movements.

"(The film) articulates what a lot of people are feeling in this current moment," he mused, adding: "in seeing that the Black Panther Party and Chairman Fred Hampton had a lot of the ideas and the philosophies and the strategies in order to help the Black community and people in their own communities, wanting to empower them to free themselves."

The film was released by Warner Bros. Pictures on 12 February.