Jharrel Jerome

Korey Wise sits across from his mother in a prison visiting room and cannot bring himself to ask her the question he has been saving up. Jharrel Jerome plays the scene with almost nothing: the head ducks, the stammer catches, the hands do not know where to go. It moved us more than we were ready for when we reviewed Ava DuVernay's When They See Us (2019), and it still does, because Jerome refuses to make Korey easy to love. He plays a boy who walked into a precinct to keep a friend company and never properly walked out, and not once does he ask us to feel sorry for him. The pity arrives on its own.

He is the only one of the five played by a single actor across the whole span, from sixteen to the man Korey becomes, and that is the fact people quote about the performance. It is the least interesting thing about it. The years are done with posture and voice rather than prosthetics, and it works because Jerome cares more about what Korey knows at each stage than how old he looks. The fourth hour belongs to him. In a series we found weaker whenever it stopped to make a speech, he is the one element that never makes one.

He had been on screen for three years by then. He was cast in Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016) while still at college, as Kevin at sixteen, in a film built from three chapters and full of good small parts. We did not single him out at the time, and it would be dishonest to pretend now that we saw it coming; he was one careful presence among several. Television followed, with Mr. Mercedes (2017–2019), then Concrete Cowboy (2020), and then DuVernay gave him four hours and he used every one.

Since then the parts have grown, and in one case literally. He plays Cootie, a thirteen-foot teenager, in Boots Riley's I'm a Virgo (2023); he voices a Miles Morales in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023); he plays Anthony Robles, a wrestler born with one leg, in Unstoppable (2024). He has said that what excites him about acting is transforming, and we believe him. We have not reviewed those films, so we will judge them lightly, but the reservation others have raised about Unstoppable rings true from a distance: a biopic that needs its subject to be inspiring leaves the actor less room to be anything else.

The transformations are the sales pitch. The restraint is the talent. Jerome is best when the camera is not waiting for him to do anything, and we would happily watch him sit in another small room, with another question he cannot ask, before we watch him climb anything at all.