Aldis Hodge

Aldis Hodge has been working since he was a child, which is why an actor who still feels like a recent discovery has thirty years of credits behind him. He is in Die Hard: With a Vengeance at eight, Big Momma's House at thirteen, The Ladykillers at seventeen. The break came in 2007, when he was cast as Alec Hardison in Leverage on the day he turned twenty-one.

Hardison is the hacker in a heist ensemble, a part usually written as comic relief, and Hodge played him as the most emotionally open person in the room. That is why the show ran five seasons and came back a decade later, and it set the pattern for everything since: he is very good at competence without arrogance, men who are the best in the room at something and have no interest in telling you so.

The run from 2015 to 2020 is the strong stretch. MC Ren in Straight Outta Compton. Levi Jackson in Hidden Figures, a husband written as an obstacle and played as a man learning in public. Noah in Underground. Jim Brown in One Night in Miami, where he has to hold a room containing Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Sam Cooke, and does it by being the quietest person in it. The Invisible Man used him as the one decent man in a thriller about not being believed.

The parts have since got bigger and blunter: Hawkman in Black Adam, John Stewart in the animated Green Lantern: Beware My Power, the title role in the series Cross. The franchise work pays, and the smaller films are where he is better.