Charles Melton

Joe Yoo sits at his own dinner table with his shoulders in while his wife tells a stranger what a fine father he is. He raises monarch caterpillars in mesh boxes and talks about them the way other men talk about their children, and he texts someone late at night and will not say who. Charles Melton plays him in May December (2023) almost entirely without raising his voice, a big man moving through his house as if nobody has told him he lives there. It is the best thing in a film that also has Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman in it, which is saying something.

Nothing before it suggested he had this in him, though that is partly because nobody asked. He came to acting from modelling, did guest turns on Glee and American Horror Story: Hotel, and then spent six years as Reggie Mantle on Riverdale, from 2017 to 2023, a part that mostly required him to be athletic and to take his shirt off on cue. The Sun Is Also a Star (2019) gave him a romantic lead of the same kind. He has said, without apparent irony, "Riverdale truly was my Juilliard — I was learning and growing and playing and taking risks. I was allowed to do that." We would not have guessed it from the outside.

Then Todd Haynes cast him, and he put on a good deal of weight to play a suburban father, and the shirtless boy vanished. We did not expect to be moved by May December, a sly, chilly, funny film about an actress researching a scandal, and Melton did it: watching Joe listen to his own life described to him by other people, we wanted to look away. He has since taken supporting parts in the second season of BEEF (2023) and in Alex Garland's Warfare (2025), neither of which we have reviewed.

Her Private Hell (2026) shows both what the method can do and where it runs out. As Private K for Nicolas Winding Refn, Melton holds a face still for minutes at a time and lets us read into it, and he is the only actor in the film who makes the slowness look like a choice rather than an instruction. But Refn gives him nothing to be still about, and a held face with nothing behind it is a photograph. The film runs a hundred and ten minutes and we could not stay with it.

So far he has been very good for one director who understood what he was for and merely dignified for another who did not. He has proved he can hold still on command. We would like to see what happens when someone asks him to move.