Laz Alonso is the man at the table who looks as if he might say no. Cast as the sane presence among the fantastical in The Boys and Avatar, he does it well; the writing rarely gives him more to do than stand there.
Fi1m perspective
When a plan in The Boys is about to go wrong, the camera tends to find Mother's Milk. Alonso plays him large and neat, arms folded, a man who has read the paperwork and would like everyone else to have read it too. He is the one person on Butcher's team who behaves as if there will be a morning after to answer for. That is the part he keeps getting, in one costume or another: the grounded human standing next to the monster or the marvel, reacting the way a person would.
He came to acting sideways, by way of a business degree at Howard and a spell as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, then hosting on BET and music videos. Supporting film roles followed from 2000, and 2009 was the year that mattered, with Fenix Calderon in Fast & Furious and Tsu'tey in Avatar arriving together. Our review of Avatar did not single him out, and that is not a slight: under a Na'vi face and Cameron's cameras, nobody is easy to find. Television leads came next, in Breakout Kings, Deception and The Mysteries of Laura, with Jumping the Broom (2011) as a first romantic lead and Detroit (2017) for Kathryn Bigelow in between. Then Eric Kripke cast him in The Boys in 2019 and kept him for five seasons.
That is where the reader can see him properly, and where the trouble with the part is clearest. Our review called the Boys the weaker half of the show and said his backstory arrives in chunks that stall the plot each time, and we stand by it. When the show stops to explain him, we felt the episode sag; when he is simply standing beside Butcher, declining to go along with something, we watched him and nobody else. His stillness works. The flashbacks do not, and they are not his fault. Alonso prepares physically for these parts, building size to match them, and he has said that every role should have its own DNA, that the goal is "to change so completely, physically, vocally, emotionally, that the last character feels unrecognisable". The odd thing is that he is best when he is recognisable: the same steady man, in a different room, waiting for the others to come to their senses.
Too much of his film work sits in projects that few people saw or liked, Battle of the Year (2013) among them, and a supporting actor is only as good as the scenes he is handed. What we would like to see is a director who gives him a table, two other actors and no green screen. Kripke found the man; someone still has to find the part.
Biography
Laz Alonso is an American actor. Born Lazaro Alonso on 25 March 1974 in Washington, D.C., to Afro-Cuban immigrant parents, he graduated from Howard University with a BBA in marketing. He worked as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch on Wall Street before entering the entertainment industry around 2000.
Alonso began with hosting roles on BET and appearances in music videos. He gained recognition for supporting parts in films including Jarhead (2005), This Christmas (2007) and Miracle at St. Anna (2008). He played Tsu'tey in James Cameron's Avatar (2009) and Fenix Calderon in Fast & Furious (2009).
From 2019 he was a main cast member of the series The Boys, portraying Marvin T. 'Mother's Milk' Milk / M.M. across its run to 2026. Other credits include Detroit (2017) and recurring television roles in The Mysteries of Laura and L.A.'s Finest.
