Corey Hawkins

Corey Hawkins is a stage actor who happens to work in film, and the parts he gets reflect it: roles that need a voice trained to reach the back of a room. His break was Dr. Dre in Straight Outta Compton (2015), a job that meant playing a living, powerful man who was watching the dailies, and it brought him a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. Around the same stretch he was on The Walking Dead and then carrying a network franchise on his own in 24: Legacy, still in his twenties.

What he is good at is holding a scene together while the character is coming apart. In BlacKkKlansman he has one long speech as Kwame Ture near the top of the film, and the whole argument the film goes on to make depends on that speech landing as genuine rather than as pastiche. He does the same load-bearing work as Benny in In the Heights, as Harpo in The Color Purple, and as Macduff in The Tragedy of Macbeth, where grief has to arrive in a few lines of verse and not tip into performance.

The theatre has stayed the centre of it. He starred in Six Degrees of Separation in 2017 and Topdog/Underdog in 2022, and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for both. On screen he has been drifting toward leads that are odder than the studio ones: Clemens in The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Avery in The Piano Lesson, and Polybus in The Odyssey.