Lashana Lynch

Brie Larson sits at a kitchen table in Louisiana and Lashana Lynch tells her who she used to be. It is one scene in Captain Marvel (2019), and it is the scene in which Larson does her best listening, because Lynch has given her something worth listening to. Maria Rambeau is a pilot and a single mother, and the film hired Lynch, as films keep doing, for the pilot. What she plays is the woman at the table, who has had years to decide what she thinks and says it in one go.

That is the habit. Lynch plays competent women who are holding something in, and she lets it out once, late, whether or not the film is ready. Her Nomi in No Time to Die (2021) inherits the number 007 while Bond is fishing in Jamaica, and for as long as the story stays outdoors she is sharp, dry and good company. Then it moves inside and she is given too little to do. Lynch has said she wanted Nomi to be "highly competent and very highly skilled, but she’s a real human being and sometimes she’s awkward", and the awkwardness is there in her early scenes. It is the script that stops being interested.

The career took a while to arrive. Small television parts from 2007, The Bill and Death in Paradise among them, a film debut in Fast Girls (2012), a lead in Still Star-Crossed (2017), and then Captain Marvel. Since then the parts have mostly needed a fight coordinator: Izogie, an Agojie warrior, in Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Woman King (2022); the agent; the pilot. Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical (2022) is the exception, Miss Honey, the kind teacher in a family musical.

The best of her so far is in Reinaldo Marcus Green's Bob Marley: One Love (2024), which is not a good film. Her Rita has been shot at, has moved countries and has watched her husband's girlfriend arrive, and Lynch plays all of it as pressure building rather than as a list of grievances. When she finally lets go, in a row we will not describe, it is the one scene in which two people say what they actually think. It moved us more than the rest of the picture put together, and then the film cut to the next song. Kingsley Ben-Adir gets the walk and the voice; Lynch gets the marriage, and the marriage is the only part of the film in which anything is at stake.

So the pattern, across the three films we have reviewed, is a large production that hires her for a uniform and discovers, too late to rewrite, that the scene it needed was the argument in the kitchen. Someone will eventually build a film around that argument rather than around the fight. Until then, she is worth watching for the ten minutes when the script remembers she is there.