Justice Smith

Simon, the sorcerer in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023), cannot make a spell work while anyone is looking at him. The easy way to play that is as a running gag. Justice Smith plays it as stage fright: the hesitation before the attempt, the eyes going to the people watching rather than to the thing he is meant to move. The jokes land because he is not telling them. That is what he does, in film after film. He takes the frightened one in the group and declines to wink at us over the character's head.

He started as a lead, Ezekiel "Books" Figuero in Baz Luhrmann's series The Get Down (2016–2017), and the studios then spent several years putting him at the edge of the frame. In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) he is Franklin Webb, whose function in the script is to scream, and he does it well enough that we wanted somebody to write him a second thing to do. He came back for Dominion (2022), alongside Daniella Pineda again. Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019) gave him a lead opposite Ryan Reynolds' voice. In Now You See Me: Now You Don't (2025) he is Charlie, the new recruit who has thought about consequences, and he supplies the sense the film keeps overriding. Sensible is a quality, not a part, and the script never makes it one.

Daley and Goldstein got the best of him because their script gave Simon a reason to be scared and then let the crew needle him for it, so the fear had somewhere to go. We laughed at Simon more than at anyone else in that film, and felt slightly mean about it, because Smith had made each fumble cost the boy something. Put him in a scene with Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez and he plays the one who wishes he were somewhere else, without ever asking for our pity. Give him only a corridor and a monster and he shouts, competently, and that is all we learn.

Away from the franchises he has been working smaller: All the Bright Places (2020), The Voyeurs (2021), Sharper (2023) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), where he is the lead, Owen. We have not reviewed them, so we will not judge them here. He said in 2024 that he "finally was saying no to things that didn't light me up, even if they were financially viable or a big blockbuster." The evidence of the blockbusters is that they mostly needed him scared and loud. The evidence of Dungeons & Dragons is that he is better scared and quiet, and the smaller films are where somebody may finally let him be.