Russell Hornsby

Watch him take a telling-off. In Fences (2016) his Lyons turns up on a Friday for ten dollars and gets a lecture with it, and Hornsby stands there and lets it land. He does not argue and he does not hurry. We found ourselves watching him rather than Washington through that speech, because his face made it plain how many Fridays this had happened before, and that told us more about the house than the speech did. It is a small part of a loud film, and it is the best evidence the films we have reviewed offer of what he does: hold his ground while a bigger man talks.

He came to that scene by the long road. Hornsby trained in theatre at Boston University and the British American Drama Academy in Oxford, worked Off-Broadway in New York in the late 1990s, including Jitney (2000), and played Lyons opposite Denzel Washington in the 2010 Broadway revival before the two of them did it again for the camera. In between he moved to Los Angeles for television: a lead in Lincoln Heights (2007-09), six seasons as Detective Hank Griffin in Grimm (2011-17), and parts in In Treatment, The Affair and BMF (2021-), where he has also directed episodes. The stage shows. He can carry a long speech when he is given one, and when he is not he tends to do less than the actors around him, which in a family drama is usually the right amount.

Film has been less generous. In Creed II (2018) his promoter, Buddy Marcelle, sneers on cue, because the script needs a man to sneer and has not written him a reason. He does it capably and it is not a part. The one everybody names is The Hate U Give, the same year, where he plays Maverick Carter, the father, and where critics found the layered Black masculinity and family authority that the smaller roles only hint at. We have not reviewed it, so we will say only that it is where his reputation sits and that it is the sensible place to start. He has said of Maverick: "He was unapologetically black. Angie Thomas wrote such a man in the real sense of the word — in terms of how I was raised, the black men I was raised by and how I’ve been stimulated in my life."

The reservation is the obvious one, and it is not about him. Casting directors see a steady man and reach for a badge: Griffin in Grimm, Detective Paterson in Last Seen Alive. He is good at it, which is the problem, because he has spent more hours on screen as the grounded partner than as anyone with a house of his own to run. The fathers and the sons are where the work is. If a director gives him one and then leaves the camera on him while somebody else talks, we would sit down for that.