Lashana Lynch is happy that Rita Marley’s story is as prominent as Bob Marley’s in Bob Marley: One Love.

Lynch talked to Blavity/Shadow and Act Managing Editor Trey Mangum about playing Marley’s wife, confidant, and creative partner. She said the film shows how Marley’s life reached a “turning point” that changed how he approached his music.

“We get to see the real turning point in his life and the turning point in the relationship and in the children’s lives and what made him have to change gears, what shifted him as an artist and where he really did produce his best work,” she said. “That was from a place of small fury, abandonment, dismay, there’s so many things that he experiences in this time period that I think gives the others around him also a lot to play with. So from a film standpoint, you really get to sit with what his experience did to everyone around him, which your regular biopic, I don’t think you’re used to.”

Lynch said that Rita’s contributions need to be front and center when Marley’s story is told.

“She deserves it. Women deserve it and Black women deserve it and they get cut out all the time. Sometimes these roles are in films and then they just don’t make it,” she said. “When you have a story like this and a life like hers that is attached to the main guy, it reminds people…what it took for that main guy to be able to lead the life that he did, lead the career that he did because of the sacrifice that the person alongside him had to make was huge.

“Without her voice in the movie, I just feel like we would be landing on the strong Black woman trope,” she said, addressing how without Rita’s story, it would just appear as if Rita was happily handling everything involving caretaking and supporting her husband from afar. “…[T]hat’s boring and that’s not real.”

Watch the full interview above. Bob Marley: One Love is currently in theaters.