Titus Makin Jr.
Titus Makin Jr. is an actor, born 1989.
Titus Makin Jr. came up through the American teen-television pipeline, which in his case meant singing as much as acting. He appeared as one of the Dalton Academy Warblers on Glee across its 2010 to 2012 stretch, a job that also put him in the concert film, and took the lead in a Cinderella Story musical sequel the same year. He writes and records under the name Butterfly Ali, blending soul, rhythm and blues, funk and hip hop, and that has never been a sideline to the acting so much as the other half of it.
The screen work has gone in two directions since. There were the young-adult genre series, Lukas Parnell in Star-Crossed and later parts in Pretty Little Liars and The Path, and then the job that gave him a real run: Jackson West on the ABC procedural The Rookie, from 2018 to 2021. Jackson is the recruit with the immaculate academy scores whose nerve keeps failing him under live fire, a part built on the gap between test results and courage, and Makin played the anxiety without ever letting it become comic relief.
Since leaving that series he has moved toward film, including Trey in the adaptation of On the Come Up. It is a short filmography with a very clear centre of gravity, and a musician's career running in parallel.
Movies (3)
TV (2)
Where to start with Titus Makin Jr.
Spend the hours on The Rookie, specifically its first three seasons, which hold the whole arc of Jackson West from academy standout to a working officer who has been genuinely frightened. It is a network procedural with all the tidiness that implies, but the character writing is better than the format demands.
For the singing, Glee: The Concert Movie is the artefact, Makin in a Warbler blazer in front of several thousand screaming people, and A Cinderella Story: Once Upon a Song is the teen musical that used the voice properly, silly but performed straight. Star-Crossed is the short-lived science fiction detour, interesting now mostly as a record of what the network was commissioning. On the Come Up is the best-made film here, and his Trey is a small, well-judged piece of it.