Nearly twenty years on stage before films noticed him, Troy Kotsur plays fathers and hard men in sign with a face that does the work the soundtrack cannot. CODA is why he is on this page; Black Rabbit suggests there is more.
Fi1m perspective
Frank Rossi has never heard his daughter sing. In the cab of a truck in CODA (2021) he asks her to do it anyway, and when the sound means nothing to him he puts his hand on her throat and reads her that way. There is no line, no cutaway, no swell of strings to help. Kotsur simply holds the moment and lets it happen on his face. We were not ready for it, and we are still not sure the film earned it so much as he handed it over. That is the thing he does that other actors do not: he works in a language most of the audience cannot follow, and the meaning arrives anyway.
He had been doing it for a long time before anyone with a camera paid attention. Deaf from birth, he began acting in the late 1980s with the National Theatre of the Deaf, then spent decades from 1994 with Deaf West Theatre in Los Angeles, including a Broadway run in Big River (2003) as Pap Finn and the Duke. His film debut came in The Number 23 (2007). He directed and starred in No Ordinary Hero (2013). Wider notice arrived with The Mandalorian (2019), where he played a Tusken Raider scout and devised the adapted sign language the Tuskens use. Then Siân Héder cast him as a fisherman on the Massachusetts coast.
Frank Rossi is a loud, randy, stubborn man who thinks he is funnier than he is and often is. Kotsur argues in sign at speed with Marlee Matlin and Daniel Durant, and Héder holds on those arguments with subtitles and no spoken voice, sometimes for whole scenes. The story around them is predictable, a remake of a French crowd-pleaser with the beats in the expected places. The Rossis are the reason to watch, and Kotsur is the loudest reason.
Black Rabbit (2025) is the deliberate opposite. He told the Los Angeles Times: "I really wanted to surprise the audience and play something that was exactly the opposite from Frank Rossi." Joe Mancuso is a mobster, and Kotsur gives him a force the series badly needs. Around Jason Bateman and Jude Law the supporting cast is thin and the plotting repetitive; Kotsur is the exception, and the last two episodes under Justin Kurzel are the only stretch that matches him. The pattern is now clear. Twice he has been better than the thing he was in.
He has also turned up in Foundation (2025), and Primate and In Cold Light are on the way. What we would like next is straightforward. He has been the best thing in two productions that did not quite deserve him. Someone should give him a third that does.
Biography
Troy Kotsur is an American actor. Born deaf in Mesa, Arizona, in 1968, he began his career in the late 1980s with the National Theatre of the Deaf. He later worked extensively with Deaf West Theatre in Los Angeles, appearing in productions including a 2001 staging of Big River that transferred to Broadway in 2003.
Kotsur received wider attention for his guest role in The Mandalorian (2019). His performance as Frank Rossi in CODA (2021) earned him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, making him the first deaf male actor to win an Oscar. He has since appeared in Foundation (2021) and as Joe Mancuso in the series Black Rabbit (2025). He is married to actress Deanne Bray.
