Jaquel Spivey

Jaquel Spivey's Damian Hubbard is worth listening to even when Mean Girls (2024) is telling us something familiar. Narrating alongside Auliʻi Cravalho's Janis, he gets the best lines while she gets the best songs. We were relieved when the pair took over the telling, because their energy made the recycled story easier to sit through. We liked him considerably more than we liked the film.

His first professional role was Usher in the Broadway production of A Strange Loop (2022); Mean Girls was his film debut. The stage performance brought together bashful tenderness, sharp comedy and demanding singing. Some critics found this Usher younger and less fully formed than the earlier off-Broadway portrayal, while still crediting his sensitivity and voice. That leaves us curious about how much of the vulnerability a screen role might allow him to keep.

In Mean Girls, directors Arturo Perez Jr. and Samantha Jayne benefit from his partnership with Cravalho, but Tina Fey's script leans too heavily on the people surrounding Cady, played by Angourie Rice. The heroine is repeatedly left at the edge while others explain her story. Spivey's confident, queer Black Damian avoids becoming a caricature, and the part gives him room to be funny without apology. The songs remain unmemorable, and neither actor can make the repeated plotting feel new for long.

The Beauty (2026) brings a change of setting, with Spivey appearing in the pilot as Jeremy (Pre Beauty). Ryan Murphy's body-horror series has gruesome invention and committed acting, alongside blunt beauty-industry satire and scattered storytelling. One pilot appearance is too little on which to declare a new direction. For now, Mean Girls gives us the clearest reason to watch him, though it also supplies plenty of reasons to wish he were in something else. A screen role that makes use of the tenderness as well as the jokes would be a better test.