Two films in 2019, and in neither did we quite see her face: a lion cub that cannot change expression and a silent double with one fixed smile. What she does with a body and a voice is clearer than what she does in close-up.
Fi1m perspective
In Us (2019) Shahadi Wright Joseph plays a daughter and her double. Zora Wilson runs; Umbrae does not speak, and smiles. Jordan Peele gives the doubles almost nothing to say, so the whole part has to be carried below the neck, and Joseph has said the hardest thing about it was exactly that: a character who has been through a great deal and cannot tell anyone. She trained to run for one half of the role and built a smile for the other. The smile is the part people remember.
She came to it from the stage. She was dancing at two, was young Nala in The Lion King on Broadway at nine, in 2014, was in the original cast of School of Rock and played Little Inez in the 2016 live television Hairspray. Then 2019 gave her two films at once, Peele's and Jon Favreau's, and after that the lead of Ruby Lee Emory in the series Them (2021–2024), which we have not reviewed.
Favreau's The Lion King (2019) asked her to reprise Nala from the stage, this time as a voice, and the voice is fine. She and JD McCrary sing "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" well, and the film stages it as a stampede of ostriches and antelope. The trouble is that Favreau's lions have been built to behave like lions, so the two cubs at the centre of the number look alert and slightly blank throughout, like cats waiting to be fed, and Adam Gerstel and Mark Livolsi cut away to the herds whenever a line needs a reaction. Her singing is in the film. Her face, for obvious reasons, is not.
In Us the attention goes to Lupita Nyong'o, in two performances, and it should; our review did not single Joseph out, and we stand by that. But we will admit that the image from the film we found ourselves unable to put down afterwards was Umbrae at a run, with that grin, and it is Joseph's, not Peele's. It is one idea held for a whole film without wavering, which is harder than it sounds at fourteen or at forty.
So the record is a good voice, a disciplined body and a face we have mostly been prevented from watching. She has said she would like to get out of horror so as not to be pigeonholed, and on this evidence the more useful next step would be simpler than a change of genre: a film that lets her stand still, speak, and be looked at.
Biography
Shahadi Wright Joseph is an American actress, singer and dancer. She began dancing at the age of two and made her Broadway debut at nine as young Nala in the musical The Lion King. She later appeared as Madison in the original Broadway cast of School of Rock and played Little Inez Stubbs in the 2016 NBC television special Hairspray Live!.
In 2019 she voiced young Nala in the film The Lion King and starred as Zora Wilson and her doppelgänger Umbrae in Jordan Peele's Us. She played Ruby Lee Emory in the Amazon Prime series Them (2021). She has also starred in the podcast series Six Minutes since 2018.
