Jonathan Majors does his best work standing still. He plays large, wounded men who have learned not to move, and in Creed III and Lovecraft Country that stillness carries more threat and more hurt than most actors manage in motion.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Jonathan Majors does in a diner in Creed III (2023). Damian Anderson, eighteen years out of prison, eats as if someone might take the plate away, and Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis cannot quite meet his eye. No punch has been thrown. Majors keeps his shoulders slightly forward, lets his eyes do the work, and says “yes, sir” a beat too long so that it means several things at once. That is the Majors performance in one scene: a big man holding himself in, and everyone else at the table adjusting around the effort.
He came through fast. After Yale School of Drama in 2016 there were small parts in When We Rise and Hostiles (both 2017), then The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) for Joe Talbot, Da 5 Bloods (2020) for Spike Lee, and the lead in Lovecraft Country (2020). In Misha Green’s series he plays Atticus Freeman, home from Korea, as a large man who has learned to stand still, and it is the right choice for a horror story in which the danger is nearly always outside the car and Tic’s job is not to give it a reason. The series gets busier than it can bear. He never does.
Then the studios found him, and what they found for him was villains: The Harder They Fall (2021), Loki (2021–2023) as variants of Kang, Devotion (2022), and in 2023 both Creed III and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Some have worried about typecasting, and the worry is fair, but look at what he did with the two antagonists he was given. Kang could have been all shouting. Majors plays him tired, quiet and courteous, a conqueror who has run out of things to conquer, and he barely raises his voice. When he does, once, it lands like a door slamming in another room. His fifteen minutes with Michelle Pfeiffer are the only stretch of a muddled film in which two people seem to share a history, and he is the reason to see it.
It was the diner that got hold of us, though. Before the first fight we knew which of the two men we would think about on the way home, and it was not the one directing. Majors has said, “I’m willing to hurt more. I’m just willing to hurt. It doesn’t bother me.” That is the work. Damian is a hurt man, and Majors lets the hurt show without once asking us to feel sorry for him. Jordan’s film barely knows what to do with that, and has the sense to let it breathe whenever the plot permits.
The risk with a stillness this good is that it becomes the only thing anyone asks for. Kang and Damian are the same man with different budgets: the better one, overlooked, come back to collect. The studio run stopped after 2023, and the later work includes Magazine Dreams. Start with Creed III, then the first hour of Lovecraft Country, and count how much he gets done without saying anything at all.
Biography
Jonathan Majors is an American actor. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, he first appeared on screen in the miniseries When We Rise (2017).
Majors rose to prominence with leading roles in the films The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) and Da 5 Bloods (2020), and the HBO series Lovecraft Country (2020), for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. Subsequent credits include Nat Love in The Harder They Fall (2021), Jesse Brown in Devotion (2022), Damian 'Dame' Anderson in Creed III (2023) and Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), as well as appearances in the series Loki (2021–2023).
Following a 2023 conviction for assault and harassment, Majors was dropped from several projects, including further Marvel Cinematic Universe work. He later starred in Magazine Dreams (2025) and is set to appear in Run Hide Fight: Infidels (2026).
