Daniel Ezra's best work is in listening: in All American he plays a boy who reads a room before entering it, and the silences do the talking. Six seasons and a spell of directing later, film has yet to ask as much of him.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Spencer James walk into the Baker house in the first season of All American (2018). He says almost nothing. Ezra plays him as a boy who has learned to read a room before he enters it, and the point of the performance is that a silence in Beverly Hills means one thing and a silence back in Crenshaw means another, and we can tell which is which without being told. The accent, South Central Los Angeles by way of Birmingham, never slips. He kept it up between takes, by his own account, so that most of the crew did not realise he was British until the pilot had wrapped.
That was his American debut, and it came after a run of British television in which he had decent parts in other people's stories: The Missing (2016), Prime Suspect 1973 (2017), and Sebastian in the National Theatre's Twelfth Night the same year. April Blair's series, drawn from Spencer Paysinger's own life, put him at the centre and kept him there as a regular for six seasons, with a recurring part in A Discovery of Witches (2018–2022) running alongside. From the fourth season he began directing episodes as well, and he directed the last one. Actors who end up directing their own long-running show usually do it because they know the thing better than anyone still on the payroll.
We did not expect to be held by a network high-school drama, and for most of the first season we were, and it was mostly him: scenes in which he has no lines and is simply taking the measure of the people talking over him. Bre-Z's Coop, who carries the Crenshaw strand once Spencer has left it, is the performance that meets his; Taye Diggs, as Billy Baker, gives him a coach to be wary of. The trouble is the show around him. Our review found the football the weakest thing in it and the first season the tightest, so his best work sits inside a series that grew looser as it went, and 132 episodes of bright interiors and clean light is a great deal of house style for one face to carry.
Film has so far given him less. He is Bradley in Edgar Wright's The Running Man (2025), which we found quick and well cast for an hour and repetitive after it; our review did not find a reason to single him out, which in a film that size is a fact about the part rather than a verdict on him. A limited series, All the Sinners Bleed, is next, and he continues to direct on All American now that he has left the regular cast. What he does best takes time, a season of someone reading rooms before the reading pays off, and nobody has yet written him a film with that much time in it. Until somebody does, the first season of All American is where to look.
Biography
Daniel Ezra is an English actor. He was born on 15 December 1991 in Birmingham and trained at East 15 Acting School.
Ezra is known for his leading role as Spencer James in the series All American (2018–), which he has also directed episodes of, and for his recurring role as Nathaniel Wilson in A Discovery of Witches (2018–2022). Earlier credits include appearances in Prime Suspect 1973 (2017) and Vera (2011). His stage work includes the filmed production of Twelfth Night (2017).
In film, Ezra plays Bradley in The Running Man (2025).
