A working actor of long standing who has spent most of her film career being the sensible one beside somebody louder. She does it well, but the two Sonic films we have reviewed give her almost nothing, and Southside with You suggests there is more.
Fi1m perspective
In Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), Maddie Wachowski is a vet married to a small-town sheriff who wants a bigger job, and when the film needs somebody to be reasonable, she is reasonable. Tika Sumpter plays her steadily and without fuss, and the script gives her nothing to be steady about. Natasha Rothwell, as her sister Rachel, has two scenes and takes both. That is the shape of Sumpter's film work so far: she is the calm one, and the camera is looking at somebody else.
Television is where she has done most of her work, and the longest stretches of it. Five years as Layla Williamson on One Life to Live (2005–2010), then eight seasons as Candace Young in The Haves and the Have Nots (2013–2021), the lead in a prime-time soap that ran and ran. She has worked twice with Tyler Perry. Film, in the same years, has mostly meant supporting parts in mainstream comedies, such as Angela Payton in Ride Along (2014), the kind of film that gets called undemanding and usually is, and then Maddie from 2020 onward.
The exception is Southside with You (2016), which she produced as well as led, playing Michelle Robinson on the day of the Obamas' first date. We have not reviewed it, so we will not judge it at length. But it is the one film in which she was asked to carry the thing rather than hold it steady, and it is the one that got her noticed for playing a woman who is clever and a little frightening. Nothing in the Sonic films asks for either.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024) is a slightly better film than the first and no better for her. She and James Marsden each get one scene of feeling before going back to holding coats. We noticed, both times, that we wanted the film to stay with her a little longer, and both times it had a hedgehog to get back to. It is not that she is doing anything wrong. It is that a supporting wife in a family franchise is a part built so that nobody notices whether it is done well, and she does it well anyway.
She has said that the lesson she has learned is to "put your head down and work", and the career reads that way: long runs, reliable turns, no fuss. The next time a director casts her, we would like them to give her something to do besides approve of it.
Biography
Tika Sumpter is an American actress and producer. She began her career as the host of the series Best Friend's Date and appeared in the daytime soap opera One Life to Live from 2005 to 2010 as Layla Williamson. She graduated from Marymount Manhattan College.
Sumpter made her film debut in Stomp the Yard: Homecoming (2010). She has since appeared in supporting roles in films including What's Your Number? (2011), Sparkle (2012), Ride Along (2014) and its 2016 sequel, Get On Up (2014), The Old Man & the Gun (2018) and Nobody's Fool (2018). On television she starred as Candace Young in The Haves and the Have Nots (2013–2021) and as Alicia Johnson in Mixed-ish (2019–2021). She also produced and starred as Michelle Obama in Southside with You (2016).
Sumpter is known for playing Maddie Wachowski in the Sonic the Hedgehog films (2020, 2022 and 2024) and the spin-off series Knuckles.
