Laurence Fishburne’s deep voice and precise delivery make even elaborate nonsense sound considered. We value the relish he brings to authority, though a film can rely too heavily on his willingness to explain its rules.
Fi1m perspective
Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King delivers the lore in John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) with enough relish to suggest he enjoys knowing more than everyone else. He and Ian McShane keep us listening longer than Michael Finch and Shay Hatten’s repetitive script deserves. The pleasure is in the delivery, though we eventually want him to have something else to say. We rate him highly, and would often prefer to see that care spent on a character with more to do than explain the plot.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), his Tyrone ‘Clean’ Miller has a different job: to make us attend to a soldier beyond the officers. Alongside Albert Hall, Frederic Forrest and Sam Bottoms, Fishburne helps make the people as convincing as the disorder around them. Dean Tavoularis’s production design gives them surroundings disordered enough to feel inhabited. We were frightened for these men because the performances made them worth caring about, even when Coppola’s talk about damaged humanity became laboured.
The supporting work of the 1980s led to more prominent dramatic parts in Boyz n the Hood (1991) and What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993), as Furious Styles and Ike Turner respectively. Then Morpheus in The Matrix (1999) made that deep voice familiar on a much wider scale. Those roles help explain both his appeal and the temptation to keep casting him as someone who knows the answers. His precision suits leaders and mentors; we are less interested when a film seems satisfied simply to have him sound authoritative.
Josh Cooley’s animated Transformers One (2024) puts his solemn delivery to work as the voice of Alpha Trion. It is sound casting in a film whose central friendship gives us something to care about, even if the last act becomes noisy. But after the Bowery King’s relish, we miss the chance to hear something beyond the weight of the voice. For a fuller sense of what Fishburne contributes to an ensemble, start with Apocalypse Now, where he helps make the film frightening by making its soldiers matter.
Biography
Laurence Fishburne is an American actor. Born on 30 July 1961 in Augusta, Georgia, he began his screen career as a teenager in Apocalypse Now (1979).
He won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for Two Trains Running (1992) and a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for TriBeCa (1993). He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his performance as Ike Turner in What's Love Got to Do with It (1993) and became the first African American to portray Othello on film in the 1995 adaptation.
Fishburne is known for playing Morpheus in The Matrix trilogy (1999–2003), Ellis Cheever in Contagion (2011), and the Bowery King in the John Wick film series (2017–2023). Recent credits include John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023), Transformers One (2024) and Megalopolis (2024).
