Indya Moore
Indya Moore is an actor, born 1995.
Pose gave Indya Moore the part that made everything else possible, and it is still the one to measure the rest against. As Angel Evangelista, Moore plays a young trans woman in the New York ball scene chasing an aggressively conventional life, a boyfriend, an apartment, a job with a paycheque, and repeatedly discovering that the world has priced those things out of reach. The role asks for glamour and for exhaustion in the same scene, often in the same shot, and Moore never lets the second undercut the first.
Moore, who is transgender and non-binary and uses both they/them and she/her pronouns, was named to Time's list of the hundred most influential people in the world in 2019, while Pose was still on air.
What followed is a working screen career rather than a run of leads: the studio thriller Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, a short but well-used appearance in Queen & Slim, Karshon in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Peggy Drood in A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting, and Skye in Father Mother Sister Brother. Alongside it runs a steady line of voice work, Shep in Steven Universe Future, Alamzapam Davis in Nimona, Brooklyn in Marvel's Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. The animation is not incidental. Voice casting has been quicker than live action to hand trans and non-binary performers ordinary parts, and those roles are exactly that: characters whose identity is not the plot.
Movies (6)
TV (3)
Where to start with Indya Moore
Begin with POSE. Angel is the role Moore was built into and out of, and the performance covers more ground than anything else here: ambition, humiliation, tenderness and a hard commercial instinct, sometimes inside a single scene.
For the range outside it, Queen & Slim is brief and worth it, a small part in a film with a lot on its mind. Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is the straightforwardly commercial one and proves Moore can hold a studio thriller's tempo, while Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom does much the same at a far bigger budget with less to chew on.
The animated work is the pleasant surprise. Nimona is the best of it, a film about being treated as a monster that never turns sanctimonious, and Steven Universe Future introduces Shep with unusual matter-of-factness. Marvel's Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur is the lightest of the three and the easiest to hand to a child.