Stro
Brian Vaughn Bradley Jr. was a teenage rapper when the first season of The X Factor USA put him on American network television in 2011. He was mentored by L.A. Reid and eliminated seventh, which is normally where a talent-show career quietly stops. His did not stop; it changed medium.
Acting came next, first a television guest spot and then, in 2014, three jobs in a single year: the science-fiction adventure Earth to Echo, the Liam Neeson detective thriller A Walk Among the Tombstones, and the Fox series Red Band Society. He was billed as Astro in that period, and the credit on Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk in 2016 still reads Brian "Astro" Bradley, which is a small record of an identity in transition.
The more interesting work came later and smaller. Luce and See You Yesterday, both released in 2019, are the two films here with something on their minds, and both use him as a supporting presence rather than as a novelty booking. He records as Stro now, and the screen work reads as one strand of a career rather than an escape from music.
Movies (5)
TV (1)
Where to start with Stro
The best film on this list is Luce, and it is also the best use of him: a tense chamber piece about a student, a teacher and a set of assumptions, in which every supporting part carries weight.
For the run that made him castable, Earth to Echo and A Walk Among the Tombstones arrived within months of each other and could hardly be less alike, one a kids' adventure shot as found footage, the other a grim detective story for adults. Red Band Society is the television of that same year.
See You Yesterday is the most enjoyable of the later films, a Brooklyn time-travel story with real ideas underneath the fun, and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is the technical curiosity, an Ang Lee war film shot in a format almost no cinema could show properly.