Thuso Mbedu

Watch what Thuso Mbedu does when someone offers Cora Randall a kindness in The Underground Railroad (2021). She takes it, and something in the face closes rather than opens. Our review said she treats any comfort as something she will be asked to pay for later, and that is the whole performance in one gesture: a young woman who has learned that being given things is how you end up owing. She listens more than she speaks. The stillness holds for ten hours, which is longer than most actors can hold anything.

That stillness was trained. Mbedu studied physical theatre at the University of the Witwatersrand, and it shows in how much of her work is done below the neck: posture, the pace of a walk, the decision not to turn round. She began in South African television in 2014 with small parts in soaps, Isibaya and Saints and Sinners among them, and became a lead as Winnie in the teen drama Is'Thunzi (2016–2017). Then Barry Jenkins cast her as Cora, and the part fitted what she does. She prepared by reading slave narratives and has said Cora "would use her silence and her voice as weapons"; on screen that is how it plays, the silence doing the work for long stretches and the voice arriving when it will do the most damage.

Jenkins is the director who has got the most from her so far, partly because he surrounds her with noise. Joel Edgerton's Ridgeway talks constantly, arguing with himself under the philosophy; Chase W. Dillon's Homer keeps the accounts in a suit and bowler hat. Mbedu says almost nothing and it is her we watch. Somewhere in the fourth or fifth hour we realised we had stopped waiting for Cora to cry, and that the not crying had become the hard thing to sit through. The series drifts in the middle and our review said so. She does not.

The Woman King (2022), her first feature, put her opposite Viola Davis as Nawi, a young recruit in Gina Prince-Bythewood's historical drama, and asked for the same determination in a more physical key. Since then there have been voice parts, in Castlevania: Nocturne and Mufasa: The Lion King, and then Task (2025), where she plays Aleah Clinton, a present-day American and a departure from the period work. Our review of Task was lukewarm and did not single her out, which tells you something: a drama built around Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey left her with too little to do. Some viewers found the American accent noticeable. We noticed the accent less than we noticed how little the script gave her.

She is now based in Los Angeles and working mostly in American productions, which will mean more parts like Aleah and fewer like Cora, unless someone writes her another woman who does not have to explain herself. On the evidence of ten hours in 2021, that is the part worth writing.