Tyler James Williams

Williams started very early, on Sesame Street, Little Bill and Saturday Night Live, and then spent four years as one of the most recognisable child actors on American television. Everybody Hates Chris, which ran from 2005 to 2009, cast him as the young Chris Rock in the comedian's own autobiographical sitcom. That is a hard assignment for a kid: carry a comedy assembled out of an adult's memories and an adult's jokes, and land them without imitating the man who wrote them.

Getting out of child acting is where most of these careers quietly end. Williams got through it by working sideways. Cyrus DeBarge in the Disney musical Let It Shine in 2012, Lionel Higgins in Dear White People in 2014, Noah on The Walking Dead across 2014 and 2015, Leon in Detroit, Lester Young in The United States vs. Billie Holiday. The Walking Dead is not among the credits listed here, but that run is what rebuilt him as an adult performer, and Dear White People is the one that showed he could hold ambivalence rather than punchlines.

Abbott Elementary made him a lead again. Gregory Eddie is a comic creation built almost entirely out of restraint, a man too formal for the room he is standing in, and Williams plays him with a stillness that gives everyone else permission to be loud. He holds a Golden Globe for supporting work in a series. Alongside it he keeps taking film jobs, Amber Alert in 2024 among them, which suggests he has no intention of being a sitcom actor only.