Sherman Augustus
Sherman Augustus is an actor, born 1959.
Football came first. Sherman Augustus played college ball at Northwestern College in Saint Paul, then professionally with the San Diego Chargers and the Minnesota Vikings, which is worth knowing before you watch him act, because the physical vocabulary never left. He is a martial artist too, and casting directors have been drawing on that for decades.
His early screen work is the standard Los Angeles apprenticeship: a police officer in Colors in 1988, a supporting turn in What's Love Got to Do with It, a sci-fi horror picture, a run of thrillers where he plays the man in the doorway. Born in Los Angeles in 1959, he has worked steadily rather than famously, and the credits are thick with single scenes.
The two roles people actually know him for arrived late, and both are soldiers of a kind: Nathaniel Moon in AMC's Into the Badlands, and Lieutenant Colonel Jack Sullivan in the fourth and fifth seasons of Stranger Things. Sullivan is the better test. The part is written as an obstacle, and Augustus plays it straight rather than sneering, which is the only reason a character like that ever survives contact with an audience.
Movies (14)
TV (2)
Where to start with Sherman Augustus
Stranger Things is the obvious entry and the least fair way to judge him, since his seasons arrive when the show is already a machine. Watch Stranger Things for the role people will name, then go back nearly forty years to Colors, where he wears the uniform in a film that treats the uniform as the whole problem.
What's Love Got to Do with It gives him something warmer to do inside a very good biographical drama. The Mexican hands him a small, sharply written part in a film that is stranger than its poster. Virus is enjoyable junk, a genre picture made almost entirely of hardware.
Into the Badlands, the other role he is known for, is not among the credits listed here.