Justin Cornwell
Justin Cornwell is an actor, born 1988.
Leading a network remake of a famous film is a difficult first big job, and that is where Cornwell started. He played Kyle Craig in CBS's Training Day, the series built on the 2001 film, which meant taking the young officer paired with a corrupt veteran: the audience's conscience, a thankless thing to write and harder still to act without turning priggish.
The credits since read like a working American actor's decade. He was Terrence Shye in I Am the Night and Damien Asante in The InBetween, played Young Jeronicus in the Netflix Christmas film Jingle Jangle, and LaMarcus Alton in Bel-Air, the dramatic reworking of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He also played Marcus Hargreeves in The Umbrella Academy. More recently he has been Remy Hodges on the 2024 Matlock series and Charlie in the action film Havoc.
He writes and plays music as well, and Jingle Jangle is the credit where that is most visible. The through-line in the acting is decency under institutional pressure: he keeps getting cast as the good man inside a bad system, and he has enough weight on screen to stop that from being dull.
Movies (4)
TV (5)
Where to start with Justin Cornwell
Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey is the easiest entry and the most purely enjoyable thing here: a big, loud, expensive Christmas musical in which Young Jeronicus has to sell the optimism the rest of the film spends its running time trading against.
Bel-Air is the better acting showcase, because the series takes a sitcom premise seriously and writes LaMarcus with more edges than that format usually permits. Training Day is the historical curiosity, worth a look for a young actor carrying a network procedural opposite a much larger performance.
I Am the Night is the strangest item on the list and the best directed. Havoc and Matlock are the recent work and show he is still moving between registers. His Umbrella Academy role is not among the credits listed here.