Joe Keery
Joe Keery is an actor, born 1992.
Joe Keery has spent a decade playing Steve Harrington on Stranger Things, and the interesting part of that is how far the character travelled without the actor visibly straining. Steve begins the series as the popular boyfriend, which is a role that normally has nowhere to go, and ends it as the closest thing a group of teenagers has to a functioning adult. Keery got there mostly through timing: he plays a man who is always about half a second behind the room and knows it.
Away from that he has been picking at the same nerve. In Spree he plays Kurt Kunkle, a rideshare driver livestreaming himself to an audience that is not there, and the performance works because the charm never switches off, not even when it should. In the fifth season of Fargo he plays Gator Tillman as loud, cruel and badly out of his depth, which is a harder note than pure menace and gets very little sympathy from the show. Free Guy gave him the straight man, and Molly's Game and Henry Gamble's Birthday Party mark either end of the small-part years.
He also records and performs music as Djo, which is not a hobby bolted onto an acting career so much as a parallel one, and it fed back into the day job when he turned up in Pavements playing Stephen Malkmus.
Movies (12)
TV (6)
Where to start with Joe Keery
You are going to start with Stranger Things whether anyone advises it or not, so the useful advice is to keep watching past the first season, because Steve Harrington is one of the few genuinely rewritten characters in modern television and the payoff is gradual.
The one to go to next is Spree, a nasty little film about audience metrics that gets much closer to what he can do than any of his studio work. Then the fifth season of Fargo, where he is unpleasant in a way nobody had asked him to be. Free Guy is the mainstream comfort option and he is fine in it, Marmalade is the small crime picture, and Molly's Game is a two-scene curiosity. For the musician, Pavements is the odd one out and the most fun: an actor playing a real songwriter inside a documentary that refuses to behave.