Arinze Kene

Lie on the bed and let the other man do the work. That is what Arinze Kene does for most of the first act of The Pass (2016), while Russell Tovey's Jason strips, flexes, stamps about half-dressed and checks the mirror. Ade watches, says nothing for long stretches, and then says the one thing Jason did not want said. It is the most useful thing an actor can do opposite a performer who talks, and few of them can bear to do it. Kene can, and Ben A. Williams keeps the camera close enough to catch him at it.

He came to that film by way of the stage, and the stage is where most of his work has stayed. He started in the Arcola's young company, played Simba in The Lion King, and did a stretch in EastEnders as Connor Stanley from 2010. Then the big parts came in a run: Sam Cooke in One Night in Miami in 2016, Joe Scott in Girl from the North Country the following year, Bob Marley in the West End musical Get Up, Stand Up in 2021, and in 2018 Misty, which he wrote and performed himself and which took him to the West End and then to New York. The screen parts have been fewer and smaller. Cal in Julia Hart's I'm Your Woman (2020), Death in Tuesday, and Major Jonesy in Lee (2024), where he is one of several people standing near Kate Winslet and the film gives him nothing to do but stand there.

So there are two Kenes, and they are close to opposites. The stage one sings, raps, talks to the audience and does not stop; the usual reservation about Misty is that it runs long, repeats itself and leans on his own magnetism where a tighter story would have served. The screen one does the reverse. He takes a part written as the listener and makes the listening the point. In the last act of The Pass, when Jason has gone cold and stiff and is trying to restart an old joke ten years too late, Kene gives Ade a stillness that tells us where the man has been without a speech. We were moved more than we expected to be, and mostly by how little he needed to do it: a refusal to be wound up, a face that has already decided.

Kene has said that acting and writing feed each other but that "there is something in me that says writing is more important." We would not argue with him about the plays, which we have not seen. We would say that the quiet actor in the hotel room is a rarer thing than the loud one on stage, and that nobody since Williams has given him forty minutes and a closed door. Someone should.