For most of his one lead role Ethan Herisse is a voice off camera and a pair of hands, and he holds the film anyway. A stillness and a stubborn decency keep a boy who believes in the rules worth watching while they fail him.
Fi1m perspective
For long stretches of Nickel Boys (2024) Ethan Herisse is not in the picture. RaMell Ross shoots Colson Whitehead's novel through the eyes of its two boys, so Elwood is mostly a voice, a pair of hands and a way of standing: careful, upright, still sure the rules will protect him if he keeps to them. It is a strange thing to ask of a lead actor. Herisse has said it "required an unlearning of everything I knew about acting, and the learning of a new language", and the odd thing is that the new language reads. We knew who Elwood was before we had properly seen his face.
There is not much career to speak of yet, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. He began with small guest parts on American television from 2012 and was seventeen or eighteen when Ava DuVernay cast him as the young Yusef Salaam in When They See Us (2019). He is one frightened boy among five there, and our review did not single him out; Jharrel Jerome took the evening. More television followed, then a supporting part in The American Society of Magical Negroes (2024), and then Ross gave him Elwood, his first lead. Two good directors with serious subjects, twice opposite Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and a pattern already forming: young Black men walking into systems built to break them.
The moment we keep returning to is the first time Ross switches to Turner's eyes. Brandon Wilson's Turner looks across a canteen table and there, at last, is Elwood, and we were startled at how young he is, and at how much of the film we had been carrying on Herisse's voice alone. That is the performance working exactly as designed. It also shows its limits. Because the camera is always one boy or the other, Herisse and Wilson are almost never in a frame together, so the friendship has to be taken partly on trust, and whenever a character speaks straight to the lens Herisse is asked to hold a look longer than a person would, and we became aware of the asking.
So the honest position is that we have seen him do one difficult thing well and very little else. The optimism is his, not the script's; Elwood could easily have been a saint, and Herisse plays him as a boy who has simply not yet been given a reason to stop trusting people. Nickel Boys used him mostly as a pair of eyes. We would like to see a film that points the camera the other way.
Biography
Ethan Herisse is an American actor. He is known for portraying young Yusef Salaam in the 2019 Netflix miniseries When They See Us and Elwood in the 2024 film Nickel Boys.
Herisse began acting in his early teens with guest roles in series including Go On (2012), Key & Peele (2014), The Mindy Project (2012) and About a Boy (2014). He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of California, Irvine in 2024. He received a nomination for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie, Limited Series or Dramatic Special for his performance in When They See Us.
