Okieriete Onaodowan
Okieriete Onaodowan is an actor, born 1987.
Two roles in one show made Okieriete Onaodowan's name, and the pairing tells you what he is for. He originated both Hercules Mulligan and James Madison in the 2015 Broadway production of Hamilton: the first a loud, physical, drunk-adjacent brawler, the second a quiet, precise strategist. Casting one actor as both is a bet that he can play scale in either direction, and it paid off. He went on to star as Pierre Bezukhov in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 in 2017, and returned to Broadway in 2023 in A Doll's House.
Television took the softer half of that range. Dean Miller on Station 19 is a firefighter written with an unusual amount of interiority for a network procedural, and Onaodowan plays him as somebody who thinks before he acts, which in that genre reads almost as a formal experiment. He is Ade Osoji on Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, the station chief in the animated Scavengers Reign, and Slick Willie in Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It.
Film has used him more sparingly. He is in American Fiction, plays a police officer in A Quiet Place Part II and Cal in The Super, and had an early role as Lou in Thanks for Sharing. The filmed Hamilton preserves the stage performance that started it, and One Night Only is on the way. For an actor with that much physical presence, the striking thing is how often he chooses to play stillness.
Movies (6)
TV (4)
Where to start with Okieriete Onaodowan
Watch Hamilton first, and specifically watch him twice: once for Mulligan, who is all volume and appetite, and once for Madison, who barely raises his voice. Same actor, same evening, and the two performances share almost nothing except intelligence.
Station 19 is the long-form work and the fairest test of him as a screen actor rather than a stage one. It is a network procedural with all the usual machinery, and he is consistently the calmest thing in it.
For something stranger, Scavengers Reign is the best-reviewed title on this list and uses only his voice, and that is plenty. American Fiction is the sharpest film here, She's Gotta Have It the most stylish, and A Quiet Place Part II the briefest.