Babs Olusanmokun
Babs Olusanmokun is an actor, born 1984.
Jamis gets one fight. Babs Olusanmokun, born in Lagos and working out of the United States, is in Dune only briefly, and the duel he is there for is the sequence that tells the audience what this desert costs. He plays it without menace or bravado, as a man doing something he considers necessary, which is why the scene works and why the character was brought back for Dune: Part Two.
Stillness is the whole method. He is not a loud actor, and he lets other people fill the silence he leaves. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has used that since 2022, where Dr. Joseph M'Benga is the calmest presence on a ship full of people who talk for a living, and the show keeps handing him its heaviest material because he can absorb it without straining. Roots gave him Omoro Kinte, Marvel's The Defenders gave him Sowande, and The Widow gave him a general.
The physicality is real rather than performed. He voiced and motion-captured Serrano for the video game Max Payne 3, a job that does not survive faking. Around the two franchises he keeps taking sharp supporting work in films of wildly varying quality: Wrath of Man, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, The Book of Clarence, and Where Is Kyra?, the smallest of them and the best acted.
Movies (6)
TV (7)
Where to start with Babs Olusanmokun
Dune is the start, obviously, and then Dune: Part Two, which finds a use for him the first film would not have predicted. Watch what he does with a role carrying almost no dialogue: it is all carriage and eye-line.
The long stay is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. M'Benga is the best-written doctor the franchise has had in years, and Olusanmokun underplays him so consistently that the episodes built around him hit far harder than the format suggests they should. After that, Roots, where he plays a father inside a story that gives him almost no room to be one, and Wrath of Man for the pure genre version of his presence. The Book of Clarence is the odd one worth an evening, and Where Is Kyra? is the film to pick if you want him small and quiet.