Marcus T. Paulk
Marcus T. Paulk is an actor, born 1986.
Marcus T. Paulk was working on network television as a child, with a part on Thea in 1993, before the job that shaped the next decade arrived: Myles Mitchell, the younger brother on Moesha, which ran on UPN from 1996 to 2001. Sitcom kid brothers are usually written as an interruption device, and the ones who survive the format are the ones who can land a joke and then get out of the way. Paulk could, for the show's entire run.
He is also a dancer and a rapper, and the film career leaned on it. Roll Bounce put him in a 1970s roller rink; Take the Lead put him in a ballroom drama built around competitive dancing. Both are movement pictures rather than acting showcases, and he is good in them the way a trained body is good on camera, which is a different skill and rarer than it looks.
The most adult credit is Red Tails, where he plays the Tuskegee airman David Watkins in a large ensemble war picture. Alongside that he voiced Myron in The Proud Family from 2001 and came back to the same character for the revival more than twenty years later, a nice piece of continuity for an actor whose best-known work was all done young. Off screen, he was the 1997 national spokesperson for a children's confidence campaign.
Movies (7)
TV (5)
Where to start with Marcus T. Paulk
You cannot skip Moesha, and you should not want to: six seasons of a well-cast family sitcom, with Myles the character who got to grow up on screen in real time. It is also better written than the nineties UPN reputation suggests.
For the films, Roll Bounce is the one to see, a warm and specific period comedy about a roller rink that treats its teenagers as people, while Take the Lead uses the dancing more directly if less charmingly. Red Tails is the biggest production he has been part of and the closest thing here to straight dramatic work.
The Proud Family and The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder make a neat pair, the same voice role two decades apart, and Another Cinderella Story and Nothing to Lose fill in the teen-musical and studio-comedy corners.