Will Poulter

In Warfare (2025), Will Poulter’s Erik keeps his voice level while his eyes show how frightened he is. He is the officer, and the effort to sound capable gives us something specific to watch amid the fighting. We found him quietly distressing because he makes that fear visible without letting it take over the voice. Garland and Mendoza give the men jobs rather than stories about home, and Poulter finds enough in the immediate task to make Erik a person. We rate him for that precision, especially in an ensemble where a small change of expression has to tell us so much.

His early films included Son of Rambow (2007), followed by the comic breakthrough of We're the Millers (2013). Jim Bridger in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015) gave him a supporting role alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, with room for his facility with American accents. Then came Detroit (2017) and Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), continuing the move into harsher material. Those choices make sense for an actor who can give an unpleasant character an inner life. He need not soften someone to make them worth watching, and taking on those parts has not required him to discard his expressiveness.

James Gunn puts that expressiveness to comic use in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023), where Poulter’s Adam Warlock is a golden man-child whose strength far exceeds his sense. Poulter is funny in every scene he has, but there are too few of them, and the film repeatedly seems to forget him. Fred Raskin, Tatiana S. Riegel and Greg D’Auria share the editing credit, and the present-day story repeatedly runs past the natural end of a scene. More Poulter would not cure that slackness, though it might make the waiting more agreeable. We would welcome a comedy that keeps him employed for more of its running time.