Zach Baylin writes men with a plan, and his scripts follow the plan as faithfully as the men do. Given a director as hard as Justin Kurzel, that makes for a lean, gripping film; given a family to honour, it goes soft.
Fi1m perspective
Richard Williams has a plan. He wrote it before his daughters were born, and King Richard (2021) watches him carry it out on the public courts of Compton with a shopping trolley of old balls and a stack of homemade brochures. Jann Mardenborough in Gran Turismo (2023) has a bedroom, a PlayStation and a father who wants him to get a job. In Creed III (2023) a man walks out on parole wanting a world title shot. Zach Baylin writes people who know where they are going, and his scripts usually know it too, which is the strength and the trouble.
He came to it late. Baylin spent more than a decade in New York as a production assistant and set dresser before King Richard, his first produced screenplay, arrived in 2021 from a pitch he had made in 2017. Since then the credits have come quickly: Creed III and Gran Turismo in 2023, Bob Marley: One Love and The Order in 2024, and the series Black Rabbit in 2025, which he created with his writing partner Kate Susman. Enough, by now, to see where he is reliable and where he is not.
He is reliable on structure. The Order is the best thing he has written: a manhunt across the Pacific Northwest in 1983, a run of bank robberies that an FBI agent slowly recognises as one organisation, and a plot that does not stop for anyone not carrying a gun. Justin Kurzel, who has spent his career on men who do terrible things, gets the best out of that, and we were held for all of its 116 minutes. The women are there to tell us about the men, which is the cost of a script this lean, and Baylin pays it without appearing to notice.
He is less reliable when the subject is somebody's father or somebody's husband. King Richard is warm and easy to sit through and never asks a hard question of the man at its centre. Bob Marley: One Love, made again with Reinaldo Marcus Green, with four writers and the Marley family credited, is more frightened still: a list of achievements with the man hidden behind them. Baylin has said he saw Richard Williams as "inspiring and so determined but also brash and self-defeating and self-serving", and the first film shows us some of that. The second shows us the discography.
Pace is the other habit. Creed III gets its man from parole to a title shot in the time most films take to cross town, and when the training montage arrived we sat through it impatient, able to name the minute it would start, aware that the friendship and the years of letters were being dealt with in a room we were not shown. Gran Turismo stops at every station of the underdog film in the expected order. Black Rabbit, with eight episodes to fill, has the opposite problem: fresh mistakes supply movement without telling us anything new about the brothers making them. Baylin does his research and builds a clean spine. Start with The Order, and hope the next true story he finds is one that refuses to behave.
Biography
Zach Baylin is an American screenwriter. A native of Wilmington, Delaware, he graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2002. He began his career working in production and art departments on films and television series in New York City before turning to screenwriting.
Baylin made his feature debut with the screenplay for King Richard (2021), which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. He subsequently wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Creed III (2023), Gran Turismo (2023), Bob Marley: One Love (2024) and The Order (2024). He co-created the Netflix miniseries Black Rabbit (2025) with his wife, screenwriter Kate Susman.
