Joseph Pierre
Joseph Pierre is an actor.
The stage work is the real reason for this page. Joseph Pierre, also credited as Joseph Jomo Pierre, is a Trinidadian-Canadian actor and playwright, and his best-known piece is a 2013 play that recontextualises two of Shakespeare's Moorish characters, Aaron from Titus Andronicus and Othello, as men Shakespeare owned in life. It was a shortlisted nominee for the Governor General's Award for English-language drama that year. His earlier plays, Born Ready, BeatDown and Pusha-Man, were published in an anthology by Playwrights Canada Press.
On screen the record is smaller and steadier. Nurse Jackson Wade on Saving Hope is the recurring role Canadian viewers will know him from. Before that he was Uncle Deuce in Get Rich or Die Tryin' and a seventeen-year-old Ray Washington in Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story, which is a striking pair of credits for a writer whose own subject is how Black men get represented in the first place.
The most recent screen credit is also the best film: Raj in Brother in 2023. The rest is small work, including a drunk in Shazam!, which is the sort of part that pays for the writing.
Movies (4)
TV (2)
Where to start with Joseph Pierre
Brother is the place to start and the best film on this list, a quiet and serious drama whose ensemble is worth the time on its own. Watch it first even though his part is not the largest in it.
Saving Hope is the long-form option and the credit most Canadian viewers recognise, a medical drama that gave him a recurring character rather than a scene. Get Rich or Die Tryin' is the earlier studio film, uneven but with a good Uncle Deuce inside it, and Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story is the serious one, a television film about Stanley Tookie Williams. Shazam! is a single-scene appearance for completists only. His plays are the substantial body of work, and they are not on this page.