Ariana DeBose is a dancer first, and West Side Story is the one film that has let her move. Since then she has been asked to sing in Wish and explain the plot in Kraven the Hunter, and has deserved more than she was given.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the moment in West Side Story (2021) when Anita leads "America" out of a courtyard and into the street. Steven Spielberg's camera circles, Janusz Kamiński's hard sunlight bounces off the tenements, and Ariana DeBose is at the centre of it, moving as if the choreography were something she had just thought of. We grinned for the whole number and did not care who saw. It is the plainest statement of what she does: she is a dancer before she is anything else, and when a film lets her move it stops being a film with a cast and becomes one with an engine.
She came up through dance and the New York stage: Bring It On: The Musical (2012), ensemble work in Motown, Pippin and Hamilton (2015–2016), then a featured turn in Summer: The Donna Summer Musical (2018). Spielberg's film was the one that made the wider world look. Her Anita is quick, funny and in charge of every room she enters, and she carries one late scene, which we will not describe, with a fury that hushed the cinema we saw it in. Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar cut the numbers on the beat but let the shots run long enough to see she is really dancing, which is the kindest thing an editor can do for someone with her training. She has said she speaks dance better than she speaks English, and that film took her at her word.
What followed did not. Wish (2023) gave her a voice and took away her body; she sings Asha with clear, unfussy power and plays her as an anxious talker, which is a welcome change after a decade of gasping heroines, but the songs are gone before the credits are. Argylle (2024) does not give her enough to notice. Kraven the Hunter (2024) makes her a lawyer in London with a deck of tarot cards whose main job is to explain the premise for the second time. Scarpetta (2026) hands her a niece, and she deserves more than she is given.
Most critics have had only kind things to say about her, and about the work itself we agree. The reservation is with the casting. Stillness and exposition are what the last four projects have asked for, and she is competent at both, but competent is not what she was in West Side Story, and it is not what she is for. It is the old difficulty of the dancer on screen: producers see the breakthrough and hire the face rather than the feet.
Somebody should build a film around the way she moves rather than the way she reads a line. Until then, watch the courtyard scene again.
Biography
Ariana DeBose is an American actress. She was born on 25 January 1991 in Wilmington, North Carolina. She began her career as a dancer and competed on the sixth season of So You Think You Can Dance in 2009. She made her Broadway debut in Bring It On: The Musical (2011) and later appeared in productions including Hamilton (2015).
DeBose gained wider recognition for her role as Anita in Steven Spielberg's West Side Story (2021). For the performance she received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, a British Academy Film Award and a Golden Globe Award. Her other film credits include The Prom (2020), Argylle (2024) as Keira, Wish (2023) voicing Asha, and Kraven the Hunter (2024) as Calypso Ezili. She appears as Lucy Farinelli-Watson in the series Scarpetta (2026). She has hosted the Tony Awards and received a Tony Award nomination for Summer: The Donna Summer Musical (2018).
