On POSE Lillah Indya Moore played hope as though nobody had told her what it would cost, and it was the hardest thing to watch in a warm series. Cinema has since given her small parts in loud films that do not need her.
Fi1m perspective
Angel wants to be a model, and on POSE (2018) Lillah Indya Moore plays wanting so that you can see it from the back of the hall. The chin goes up, the shoulders go back, and the eyes keep checking whether anyone has noticed. It is the walk of someone who has decided the world will come round to her, and Moore never lets on that Angel suspects it might not. We found her hard to watch, and said so in our review, because the series is set in 1980s New York and we know more about the decade than Angel does. That is the performance: hope carried at full height, with the audience holding the bad news.
She came to acting sideways. She was modelling at fifteen and moved through the ballroom scene before her first feature, Saturday Church (2017), as Dijon. Then Steven Canals, Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy cast her as Angel Evangelista, and she stayed for the run of the series, 2018 to 2021. Around her, Billy Porter and Dominique Jackson led the ensemble and Jackson got the best lines; Rodriguez's Blanca did the nagging. Moore's job was quieter. Angel is the one who believes, and in a series whose speeches run long, a face that simply hopes is a relief and then a worry.
What the runway taught her is how to be looked at, and how to let the looking cost something. She stands well and stills well, and it is in long-form television, with weeks for a hurt to build up, that this pays off. Film has so far asked less of her. Queen & Slim (2019), Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021) and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023), in which she is Karshon, a council member, are all supporting or brief. We scored the Aquaman film 45, found Momoa and Wilson's bickering the best of it and the rest loud and soft-edged, and did not single her out, which says less about her than about how much screen a council member is given. There is also voice work, as Alamzapam Davis in Nimona (2023), and an appearance in The Sandman.
The complaint, and it is a fair one, is that a lead performer on television has been a bit-part player in cinema since the series ended. She carried a series for three years. Cinema has not yet handed her a film. Father Mother Sister Brother (2025) puts her in front of Jim Jarmusch, a director content to watch a person stand in a doorway and say little, which is closer to what she does than a council chamber under the sea. We have not seen it and will not judge it. Watch POSE for her, and then watch what Jarmusch does with someone who knows how to stand still.
Biography
Indya Moore is an American actor and model. Born on 17 January 1995 in the Bronx, New York, they are known for playing Angel Evangelista in the FX series Pose (2018–2021).
Moore has appeared in the films Queen & Slim (2019), Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021) and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023) as Karshon. Voice credits include Nimona (2023) and Steven Universe Future (2019). Time named Moore one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2019.
