Brian Stokes Mitchell

Broadway is the main job, and everything here is the part of it that happened to get filmed. Mitchell is a baritone who has been one of the theatre's central leading men since the nineties, with a Tony Award, a Drama Desk, an Outer Critics Circle award and a Grammy nomination behind him, and that career shows up in a screen filmography obliquely: an archived Ragtime performance as Coalhouse Walker Jr. in Broadway's Lost Treasures III, a King Hedley II excerpt in The Best of The Tony Awards.

Before any of it he was a jobbing television actor, billed then as Brian Mitchell. He appears in Roots: The Next Generations in 1979 and played Justin Jackson on Trapper John, M.D., then moved through the eighties and early nineties the way working actors did: Houston Knights, Mancuso F.B.I., an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, a part in Ghost Dad.

The voice has done quiet work too. He sang Jethro in The Prince of Egypt uncredited, and he is the Nowhere King in Centaurworld, a piece of casting that understood exactly what a stage baritone can do to a children's cartoon when it stops being cute. The recent screen career is character parts with authority built in: Scott Knowles in Mr. Robot, Father Mulvehill in Evil, Everett Sterling in Prodigal Son, Ken Corley in East New York. The instrument is unchanged; the material is smaller than the one he uses it on for a living.