On stage Brian d'Arcy James carries whole musicals; on screen he is the man at the next desk, the reporter or officer you accept without looking twice. That is a skill, and Spotlight shows how much a film can rest on it.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the newsroom scenes in Spotlight (2015) and try to describe what Brian d'Arcy James is doing. Matt Carroll is at his desk, on the phone, in the meeting, writing on a pad. He has no big speech, no breakdown, no scene built to show him off; Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo get those. What d'Arcy James does is make the four reporters look like people who have shared an office for years, and Tom McCarthy's film needs that more than it needs another star turn.
That is the pattern of his screen career. He turns up as reporters, officers and officials: Carroll at the Globe, Anton in Alex Garland's Devs (2020), Officer Krupke in Steven Spielberg's West Side Story (2021). The parts are supporting, nearly always, and he plays them as men with jobs rather than men with arcs. In Devs we barely noticed him, and given how much of that series is spent explaining free will, not being the one doing the explaining is no disgrace.
The surprise, for anyone who knows him only from film, is that on stage he is the whole show. He made his Broadway debut in Blood Brothers in 1993, sang through Titanic and Carousel, and by 2008 was the title character in Shrek the Musical, a run that lasted two years. In 2015 alone he was Nick Bottom, the lead in the musical Something Rotten, and King George III in Hamilton Off-Broadway, a part he originated. We have not reviewed any of these and will not judge them from here. The point is that the man who disappears into the Globe newsroom is the same man who can hold a Broadway house for an evening. He has said that "I understood there was a difference between it being a hobby and it being a craft", and the screen work looks like exactly that: a craftsman arriving and doing the job the scene requires.
Our one honest reaction is this. We came out of Spotlight upset by the material, as the film intends, and only afterwards worked out that the calm of the reporting scenes, the sense of four people doing a hard thing carefully, owed a good deal to him. Nobody notices that sort of contribution while it is happening.
The criticism, if it is one, is that the screen has not yet given him a lead, and a stage career of this size suggests it could. Until it does, look for him in the second row of a good ensemble. He will be the one making the others believable.
Biography
Brian d'Arcy James is an American actor and musician. Born on 29 June 1968 in Saginaw, Michigan, he trained at Northwestern University and began his career in theatre.
He is known for Broadway roles including Shrek in Shrek the Musical, Nick Bottom in Something Rotten!, King George III in Hamilton and The Baker in Into the Woods, for which he has received five Tony Award nominations. On screen, his credits include Matt Carroll in Spotlight (2015), Joseph A. Walker in First Man (2018), the President of the United States in Dark Phoenix (2019) and Andrew Baker in the series 13 Reasons Why (2017).
