Byron Bowers is a stand-up who plays supporting men in other people's stories, and he plays them small: patient, slightly hurt, waiting for someone else to move. It works when the part has something under it and disappears when it does not.
Fi1m perspective
There is a scene in Kimi (2022) where Terry asks Angela to walk with him to a food truck across the street. It is a few yards. She gets as far as the door. Byron Bowers plays the hurt small, a man who has asked this before and has already decided not to make a scene about it, and it is the plainest, truest thing in a film that is otherwise busy being a thriller. That is his habit on screen. He does not push. He stands where he is put and lets you notice him.
He came to acting late and sideways. He began stand-up in 2005, moved to Los Angeles in 2008 and spent years on comedy programmes, The Eric Andre Show and The Pete Holmes Show among them, before KUSO (2017) and a supporting part as Percy in Honey Boy (2019). Since then the work has been steady and mostly supporting: Concrete Cowboy (2020), No Sudden Move (2021) and Kimi for Steven Soderbergh, and on television The Chi (2018), Irma Vep (2022), Swarm (2023) and Lady in the Lake (2024). His stand-up runs alongside it, and his material, about mental health, family, race and belief, is more personal than anything he has yet been asked to do in front of a camera. The 2022 special was directed by Alma Har'el, who has now worked with him three times.
The two parts we have reviewed show both sides of the habit. In Kimi Soderbergh and Koepp give Terry very little and Bowers fills it; the threshold scene moved us more than a scene about a food truck has any right to, because he lets the disappointment show and then puts it away before Kravitz can see it. In Irma Vep Herman exists so that Los Angeles can ring Paris and be laughed at, and the Hollywood satire is the broadest thing in the series. Bowers cannot do much with a character who is there to be a punchline about franchises, and he does not try to. When the writing is thin, he is thin with it.
He has said that he went from joke-telling to storytelling and noticed how differently it lands. On stage he has had room to prove it. On screen he has not, quite; the parts have been decent, the scenes short, and nobody has yet built a film around the patience he showed at Angela's door. Watch Kimi for the scene that suggests what he might do with a whole evening, and wait to see whether anyone gives him one.
Biography
Byron Bowers is an American comedian, writer and actor. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, he moved to Los Angeles in 2008 to pursue comedy.
He is known for film roles including Percy in Honey Boy (2019), Rome in Concrete Cowboy (2020), Maurice in No Sudden Move (2021) and Terry Hughes in Kimi (2022). On television he has played Meldrick in The Chi (2018) and appeared in Irma Vep (2022) and Swarm (2023).
Bowers has performed stand-up at festivals such as SXSW and Oddball Comedy Fest, and released the special Byron Bowers: Spiritual N**a in 2022.
