Ntare Mwine

In Smoke (2025), the arson case runs out of things to say well before the ninth episode, and Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine's Freddy Fasano does not. Freddy is a man in visible distress, and the series would like to file that distress as a clue. Mwine will not let it. We found we were still watching him, uneasily, after we had stopped caring who set the fires; the performance stayed troubling when the case had become a chore. That is a hard thing for an actor to manage in a series that is not doing him many favours.

He has been at this since 1992, when a national tour of Six Degrees of Separation started him off, and for a long time television used him the way it uses good actors it has not yet worked out: a guest spot on ER, another on Law & Order, a film debut in Blood Diamond (2006). Recurring parts followed, on Heroes (2006–2009), on David Simon and Eric Overmyer's Treme (2010–2013), twice for Steven Soderbergh. The turn came with Lena Waithe's The Chi (2018–2020), where his Ronnie Davis was a man kept precariously balanced, and then Ekwa Msangi's Farewell Amor (2020), a lead as Walter, quiet and dutiful. We have not reviewed either, but that is where the reputation was made.

What he does is trained rather than instinctive, and he says so. Of Freddy he has admitted, "I was terrified, because I did not know how to pull this off." The answer was preparation: he lost a great deal of weight for Smoke and wore prosthetics, then built himself back up to play Blessing Kamara in Dexter: Resurrection (2025) in the same year. The two men are deliberately opposite, and the contrast is the case for him as an actor who remakes himself for a part. We will be honest about the other half of that case: in Dexter, sat at Michael C. Hall's table of worse people, he did not draw our eye, and our review did not single him out. The series is nimble and funny and it belongs to Hall.

The risk in his career is plain from the parts list: the traumatised, the marginalised, the man living on the extreme. He plays them better than most, which is why he keeps being asked, and there is a limit to how long any series can hold our sympathy for someone in that much pain. Walter in Farewell Amor suggests he is at least as good when nothing is wrong with the character except his circumstances. After thirty years the parts have caught up with him. We would now like to see one that lets him stand still.