Algee Smith
Algee Smith is an actor, born 1994.
2017 did most of the work. Algee Smith had been picking up small parts for years, a kid in Let It Shine (2012), Marcus in Earth to Echo (2014), an uncredited jock in Barely Lethal, when BET's The New Edition Story cast him as Ralph Tresvant and Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit cast him as Larry Reed in the same twelve months. The first made him known. The second got him reviewed.
He has since specialised in a hard register: the young man a story does something to. Khalil in The Hate U Give (2018) is the role the entire film turns on, and it is a short one. Chris McKay on Euphoria is a college football player carrying far more than the series ever slows down to examine. Jake Winters in Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) is a supporting part in a film crowded with them.
Smith is a singer as well as an actor, which the New Edition job required outright, and the two 2017 roles between them are a decent argument that he should have been given more musical work than he has been.
The recent list is scattered: Sam in Mother/Android (2021), Illya McGee in Shooting Stars (2023), Kevin in The Gates, dated 2026 in our records. The gap between the quality of that 2017 to 2021 run and the size of what has been offered since is the open question on this page.
Movies (9)
TV (2)
Where to start with Algee Smith
Detroit first, and brace for it. It is the least comfortable thing here by a distance, and his Larry Reed is the performance that made casting directors pay attention.
The Hate U Give is the one most people have seen, and his Khalil sets the whole film in motion from a very small amount of screen time. Euphoria is the opposite: a full serialised arc, with McKay given room across episodes that the films never allowed him.
For the singing, The New Edition Story is the reason he broke through and still the most purely enjoyable thing on the list. Judas and the Black Messiah shows him holding his own inside a stacked ensemble, and Shooting Stars is the light one to finish on.