Dominique Fishback

Watch Dominique Fishback in Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) and notice how little she does when Fred Hampton is talking. Daniel Kaluuya's Hampton fills halls; with Deborah Johnson, a poet who has joined the chapter, he is formal and slightly clumsy, and Fishback plays her as the one person who sees him whole rather than as a chairman. Their scenes are small, a kitchen, a bed, a notebook, and she is listening in all of them. Those were the scenes where we felt most for anyone in the film, because she let us watch a man being weighed by someone who liked him and was not going to be talked round. Kaluuya has the speeches. She has the quiet after them, and that is where the film is at its best.

She came up through television, and through one writer in particular. After a one-woman play, Subverted (2014), and guest parts in The Knick and The Americans, David Simon cast her as Billie Rowan in Show Me a Hero (2015) and then as Darlene in The Deuce (2017 to 2019). Simon's series ask actors to be ordinary for a long time and to hold our attention anyway, and that is still how she works. Film came in supporting sizes, Night Comes On (2018), The Hate U Give (2018), Project Power (2020), before Shaka King gave her Deborah Johnson. She wrote poems for the part; she has a background in spoken word and playwriting, and it shows in how carefully she handles other people's lines.

What she does not do is raise her voice, and that is a problem when the film around her does. In Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023) she gives Elena Wallace a researcher's impatience with people who will not read the label, and for an hour, opposite Anthony Ramos, the two of them are the most likeable thing the series has done. Then the plot, the sky and the shouting arrive, and there is nowhere left to be impatient in. They are not given much to do together, and what they are given they do well. It is a decent performance in a film that stops needing performances halfway through.

We have not reviewed Swarm (2023), the series she led and produced, so we cannot say whether the watchfulness holds when the whole thing rests on her. Her own account of the method is modest: "I approach all my characters similarly—I try to find the through line of what I have in common with them." Every actor says something like that. The difference is that she does it in the quiet parts, where a lot of actors are waiting for their turn. The question for the next few years is whether a director will build a film around that, as King did for a handful of scenes, or keep standing her next to something louder. Give her a kitchen and someone worth weighing, and she is good.