Corey Hawkins makes serious men good company, most clearly as Dr. Dre in Straight Outta Compton. We like him when there is room for humour; the preaching in The Piano Lesson is less rewarding.
Fi1m perspective
In the studio scenes of Straight Outta Compton (2015), Corey Hawkins lets Dr. Dre concentrate on the music without becoming solemn about it. He can be serious and still be someone the others enjoy having around. Alongside O’Shea Jackson Jr. as Ice Cube and Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E, he helps make the musicians seem comfortable enough together to be funny. We warmed to him because those exchanges let Dre enjoy himself without making him look foolish. It remains our clearest recommendation for his screen work.
The lead in 24: Legacy (2017) followed that breakthrough, but the subsequent films have not settled into one kind of part. In the Heights (2021) casts him as Benny; Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) gives him Macduff. His stage work has continued alongside the musical and literary adaptations. We would rather see him keep making those changes than spend a career being asked to reproduce Dre, though the less successful performances help explain what was so appealing about that first substantial impression.
The Piano Lesson (2024) is a useful caution. Malcolm Washington has a fine cast, but Hawkins’s Avery preaches at the furniture, and the emphatic delivery tells us too little about the man. Samuel L. Jackson’s Doaker makes the piano’s history compelling by telling it plainly, while Michael Potts’s Wining Boy conveys a life’s disappointment in a few minutes at the keys. Against that company, Hawkins’s insistence feels less revealing. The cramped parlour and slow middle hour are not his responsibility, but his performance gives us less reason to look past them.
His work also includes Polybus in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) and Tillman in Bart Layton’s Crime 101 (2026). We recommend the former with a caveat about its long middle stretch; the latter’s capable cast cannot quite disguise how familiar the heist is. Neither displaces Dre as the part that best explains our interest in Hawkins, particularly his ability to keep musical concentration sociable. Start with Straight Outta Compton; the studio scenes are worth sitting through the business disputes.
Biography
Corey Antonio Hawkins is an American actor. He graduated from the Juilliard School in New York.
Hawkins rose to prominence with his role as Heath in the television series The Walking Dead (2015–2016) and as Dr. Dre in the film Straight Outta Compton (2015). He received Screen Actors Guild Award nominations for the latter and for his performance in BlacKkKlansman (2018). On Broadway he starred in Six Degrees of Separation (2017) and Topdog/Underdog (2022), earning Tony Award nominations for both.
His other film roles include Kong: Skull Island (2017), In the Heights (2021) and The Color Purple (2023). He appeared as Avery in The Piano Lesson (2024), Tillman in Crime 101 (2026) and Polybus in The Odyssey (2026).
