Leslie Odom Jr.

Near the start of The Exorcist: Believer (2023), a father stands in flat daylight looking at trees. His daughter has walked into the woods after school and not come back, and Leslie Odom Jr. plays Victor Fielding tight and courteous, a man who would rather answer the police properly than let anyone see what he is thinking. Timothy Alverson holds the shots long enough for us to watch him not cry. We were properly uneasy, and it was because nobody was trying to frighten us yet; the whole of the fear was in a face that would not move.

That is a choice, and a surprising one for a man who came up singing. Odom made his Broadway debut at seventeen, as Paul in Rent (1998), spent years in recurring television parts, and then became Aaron Burr in Hamilton (2015), the role that made his name. Burr asked for a full voice and a brooding patience. The films that came after have wanted the patience and mostly done without the voice: Dr Arbuthnot in Murder on the Orient Express (2017), Sam Cooke in Regina King's One Night in Miami... (2020), Lionel Toussaint in Glass Onion (2022). He went back to the stage for Purlie Victorious (2023), a comedy that let him preach, and returns to Burr from September 2025.

The pattern in the films is that they hire him for credibility. In Glass Onion Rian Johnson gives Lionel one trait, the scientist whose good name Bron borrows and never returns, and asks him to keep hitting it. Odom hits it with more care than the part needs, while the film gives its laughs to Kate Hudson and its heart to Janelle Monáe. It is a good film and a small job. The Exorcist: Believer is a poor film and a much larger job, and its early stretch is the best account we have of what he does on screen. David Gordon Green and Michael Simmonds shoot him without fog or blue filter, and he gives them a grief so contained it reads as good manners. Then the exorcism arrives, the shouting starts, and the film stops needing him to be still.

Sam Cooke is the part his admirers point to, and since we have not reviewed it we will say only that a singer who is also a careful listener sounds like the right brief for him. Somebody should write him a man who has to open his mouth before he is ready. Until then, the honest recommendation is the first act of a horror sequel we would not otherwise send you to.