Paapa Essiedu

Kwame Acheamong, in I May Destroy You (2020), is a fitness instructor who arranges his sex life through an app and keeps everything else to himself, and Paapa Essiedu plays him almost entirely by what he does not do. On a sofa with Arabella and Terry he is quick, loose and funny, the friend who says the thing the other two are only thinking. Alone, or with a stranger, the face closes and stays closed. The series later gives Kwame a story of his own, which we will not describe, and Essiedu plays the aftermath so quietly that it took us a full episode to realise how frightened we were for him. Nothing in his manner had changed; that was the point.

He came to the screen late and from the stage. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2012 and by 2016 was its Hamlet, the first Black actor to play the part for the company. Television and film offered him small things for the rest of the decade, several of them stereotypical supporting parts in period pieces. Michaela Coel changed that. Writing, co-directing and acting opposite him, she wrote Kwame as fully as she wrote herself, and he has not been short of work since: Gangs of London, The Lazarus Project and Black Mirror on television; Men (2022), for Alex Garland, and The Outrun (2024) in cinemas. Between them he keeps going back to the theatre, most notably to play several men in one evening in Caryl Churchill's A Number (2022).

What he does best is withhold. He said as much of Kwame, that the interesting route was 'what he doesn't say rather than what he does say', and that is the method: the feeling is there, visible if you look, and never announced. It is a rare thing on screen, where most actors show us the emotion to be safe, and it depends on the writing. Coel gave him room and silences to fill. The Outrun does not. His Daynin, the man Saoirse Ronan's Rona leaves behind in London, is warm and hurt and off the screen before we have learned anything about him that is not about her; Nora Fingscheidt's film knows what he is for and does not much wonder who he is. He plays it well. There is simply not much of it.

That has been the shape of his film career so far: good in the corner of somebody else's picture. The stage keeps handing him whole men and the cinema keeps handing him useful ones. What we would like to see next is a film that treats him as Coel did, as a person whose life carries on when the camera is elsewhere, and then has the nerve to leave the camera on him.