Kelvin Harrison Jr.

In Mufasa: The Lion King (2024) Kelvin Harrison Jr. is only a voice, coming out of a photoreal lion, and he is still better in it than Aaron Pierre, who has the title role. Taka is a prince who is generous, spoilt and afraid of his father in roughly equal parts, and Harrison keeps all three going at once, so that a cub showing off to his adopted brother is also listening for who else is in earshot. We did not expect to be moved by two computer-drawn cubs racing and squabbling and covering for each other, and we were, and most of that is his doing. Mads Mikkelsen gets the better villain. Harrison gets the better of the two cubs.

That is the part he keeps playing: a young man under pressure. He started with small parts in Ender's Game and 12 Years a Slave (both 2013), followed by more than one slave role, something he has himself remarked on. Trey Edward Shults gave him Travis in It Comes at Night (2017) and Tyler in Waves (2019), and Luce (2019) put him at the centre of a film that turns on whether to believe him; critics noticed how precisely he kept the question open. Julius Onah has also directed him twice. We have not reviewed those films, and they are where his reputation was made, in independent dramas about young Black men under pressure.

Since then he has mostly played real people: Fred Hampton in The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020), the composer Joseph Bologne in Chevalier (2022), B.B. King in Elvis (2022). He has a background in jazz and gospel, and the musicians suit him. In Elvis he is elegant, and Baz Luhrmann hardly uses him: he is there to make a point about who made this music and who got paid for it, a point delivered once in song by Gary Clark Jr. and then again in dialogue. Harrison knew what he had signed up for. "It's the spirit of B.B. King and the most fun version of himself," he said of the part, and that is what he plays, in the few minutes he is given to play it.

The thing he does well is not push. Where another actor would announce Taka's fear or King's grievance, Harrison lets you catch it, and in a quiet film that reads as intelligence. In a loud one it can read as absence; he is easy to lose in a Luhrmann frame, and the film loses him. Next he plays Jean-Michel Basquiat in Samo Lives. A painter everyone was looking at is his kind of part, and we would like to see him given the whole of a film again.