Franz Drameh is a persuasive ensemble actor, helping a gang of boys feel like people with a shared history. We would like to see more roles that make as good a use of him as Attack the Block does.
Fi1m perspective
In Attack the Block (2011), Franz Drameh’s Dennis belongs to the gang before we have learnt much about him. Alongside Alex Esmail’s Pest and Leeon Jones’s Jerome, he helps make their exchanges sound like a conversation already in progress. John Boyega’s Moses provides the steady centre, leaving the others room to be restless and funny. We laughed at their exchanges, then grew anxious when the shaggy-haired creatures came after them, because the actors had made the boys worth worrying about.
Joe Cornish stages the siege clearly and allows the young cast to be funny without making the danger feel less urgent. The social lessons can arrive too heavily underlined; the boys’ shared energy does more persuasive work than the explanations. Dennis is the hot-head, and it would be easy for that to become his entire character. Drameh helps give him a life within the gang, so that we can believe these boys knew one another before the creatures arrived.
The move to Ford in Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow (2014) took him into larger-scale science fiction, still within an ensemble. Tom Cruise makes repeated defeat funny, and Emily Blunt helps give the film its appeal. We recommend it readily, with a caveat about the later plotting, but it offers less of a basis for singling Drameh out. The strongest reason to watch him remains the ease of those group exchanges in Cornish’s film.
From 2015, his work as Jefferson “Jax” Jackson / Firestorm took him across five Arrowverse series, including The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow. He was paired with Victor Garber as Firestorm, in what became his longest sustained television part. Later parts include Boots in See (2019) and Benny in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen (2019), continuing his work across science fiction and crime comedy. Those ensembles offer room for the skill Cornish used: making the people around him seem to know one another. Start with Attack the Block, and pay attention to the boys around Moses.
Biography
Franz Drameh is an English actor. He was born on 5 January 1993 in Hackney, London.
His film roles include a part in Clint Eastwood's Hereafter (2010), Dennis in Attack the Block (2011) and Ford in Edge of Tomorrow (2014). On television he played Jefferson Jackson / Firestorm in The Flash (2015–2017) and the first three seasons of DC's Legends of Tomorrow (2016–2018), and Boots in the series See (2019–2021). He also appeared as Benny in The Gentlemen (2020).
