Lil Rel Howery

Milton Howery Jr worked the Chicago stand up circuit for years before television found him, first on NBC's The Carmichael Show as Robert Carmichael and then, in 2018, with Rel, a series he created and co produced. It ran a single season.

The role that changed everything took about twelve minutes of screen time. Rod Williams in Get Out is a TSA agent who works out the plot from a phone call and cannot get anyone to take him seriously, and Howery plays him at exactly the right pitch: fast, certain and completely correct. That is a hard trick, because the comic relief in a horror film is usually the character an audience wants to hurry past, and instead he became one of the reasons people rewatch it. The underlying skill is confidence without vanity. His characters believe every word coming out of their mouths, which is funny when they are wrong and thrilling when they are right.

Since then he has been a fixture in studio comedies, in Tag, Good Boys, Free Guy and Vacation Friends, usually as the friend with the loudest opinion in the room. The dramatic work is thinner on the ground but he can clearly do it, most obviously in Judas and the Black Messiah. He is at his best when a director lets him keep talking a beat longer than the scene strictly needs.