Morris Chestnut
Morris Chestnut is an actor, born 1969.
Morris Chestnut (born 1969) got his first professional job in 1990 on Freddy's Nightmares, the anthology series spun off from A Nightmare on Elm Street, and his first feature role a year later as Ricky Baker in Boyz n the Hood. That is an unusually heavy debut for a young actor, and it fixed how directors saw him for a decade: the decent one, the one the audience is asked to care about.
He worked steadily through the studio machine afterwards, in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995) and G.I. Jane (1997), with an early bit part the same year as Boyz n the Hood in The Last Boy Scout, credited as Locker Room Kid. The turn that mattered came in 1999 with The Best Man, where he played Lance Sullivan, a professional footballer on the eve of his wedding. He reprised the part in The Best Man Holiday and again in the 2022 follow-up series, and earned NAACP Image Award nominations for both film performances. In between he was an NBA star in Like Mike and a professional athlete again in The Game Plan, a narrow niche he was very good at filling.
The last stretch has been television, where he anchors network drama rather than supporting films: Barrett Cain on The Resident, and Watson after it. He also won the Madden Bowl in 1998, which is the sort of stray fact a career this consistent rarely gives you.
Movies (30)
- Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (2004)
- Kick-Ass 2 (2013)
- Boyz n the Hood (1991)
- Identity Thief (2013)
- The Last Boy Scout (1991)
- The Cave (2005)
- Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995)
- The Game Plan (2007)
- G.I. Jane (1997)
- The Call (2013)
- Heist (2015)
- Like Mike (2002)
- Girls Trip (2017)
- Ladder 49 (2004)
- Think Like a Man (2012)
- Not Easily Broken (2009)
- Confidence (2003)
- Higher Learning (1995)
- Half Past Dead (2002)
- The Perfect Guy (2015)
- The Best Man (1999)
- When the Bough Breaks (2016)
- Two Can Play That Game (2001)
- The Inkwell (1994)
- The Brothers (2001)
- The Best Man Holiday (2013)
- Scenes of the Crime (2002)
- The N Word (2006)
- The Perfect Holiday (2007)
- Breakin' All the Rules (2004)
TV (15)
- LIVE with Kelly and Mark (1988)
- The Resident (2018)
- Goliath (2016)
- Rosewood (2015)
- Nurse Jackie (2009)
- V (2009)
- Number One on the Call Sheet (2025)
- The Wendy Williams Show (2008)
- Living Single (1993)
- Watson (2025)
- Legends (2014)
- Reasonable Doubt (2022)
- The Enemy Within (2019)
- C-16: FBI (1997)
- Out All Night (1992)
Where to start with Morris Chestnut
Boyz n the Hood is the obvious first stop and the correct one, because everything else in the career is a reaction to it. Watch that, then jump straight to The Best Man, the film that let him play charm instead of vulnerability and gave him an ensemble to bounce off. The Best Man Holiday picks the same characters up more than a decade later and is better than a sequel that late has any right to be.
For the lighter register, Like Mike and The Game Plan are family comedies that use his athletic bearing as the joke, and both are more watchable than their premises suggest. The Call is the tightest of the thrillers. If you want the long-form version, The Resident gives him a full network run in a lead role.