Pierre, Aaron (1994- )

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    Aaron Pierre: From Action Prince to Lion King

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    The British actor stars as an ex-Marine in the new Netflix thriller “Rebel Ridge” and as the titular cat in the upcoming “Mufasa: The Lion King.”Aaron Pierre was an unsure British teenager when he took his first acting gig: a narrator in a secondary-school production of “Moby Dick.” The school didn’t have a dedicated drama program and produced a play once every three years; Pierre had focused on athletics before giving the stage a try.As he recalled during a recent video call from his apartment in Los Angeles, his adolescent mind was thinking, “What’s going to happen to me walking through the halls if I do this play?”The show turned out to be painless. He went out, hit his mark at the corner of stage left and looked at the audience as he said his few lines. “I remember getting backstage and just being like, ‘That was amazing,’” Pierre said.The roles have grown a bit larger. Pierre, 30, played the hard-luck soldier Cassio in a 2018 production of “Othello” at the Globe Theater. The film and TV director Barry Jenkins saw him and was impressed enough to reach out to the actor on Twitter. That led to Pierre’s role as the yearning and enslaved Caesar in Jenkins’s mini-series “The Underground Railroad.”Since then, Pierre has played an ill-fated rapper in M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller “Old” (2021) and Malcolm X in the anthology series “Genius: MLK/X.” He currently has another major role, in “Rebel Ridge” (streaming on Netflix), directed by Jeremy Saulnier (“Green Room”); Pierre plays Terry Richmond, an ex-Marine who faces off against civil forfeiture and a corrupt police force. In December, he voices the digitally animated lead of “Mufasa: The Lion King,” reuniting with both Jenkins and the actor Kelvin Harrison Jr., who played the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in “Genius.”Pierre didn’t appear to be too caught up in the anticipation. “I don’t take myself seriously, but I do take my craft extremely seriously,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Rebel Ridge’ Review: Their Corruption, His Destruction

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      This crime drama from Jeremy Saulnier stars Aaron Pierre as a man whose run-in with small-town police officers uncovers uncomfortable secrets.A veteran arrives in a rural town to find his friend. He comes in peace — but the police demand submission. “Rebel Ridge,” written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, wears its “First Blood” inspirations as boldly as John Rambo sported a patch of the American flag. That franchise distended into Afghanistan, where Sylvester Stallone machine-gunned the Red Army during the long Soviet war there. But Saulnier (“Blue Ruin,” “Green Room”), a specialist in thrillers set in the margins of society, keeps this efficient tale of ethical outrage as simple as a punch to the throat — or rather, given its stark cinematography, like a shot of someone patiently walking up to a bully and then punching them in the throat.The law remains more or less the same as it was 40 years ago, when it didn’t strain the audience’s credulity to imagine conservative cops loathing a hippie drifter. These Southern officers are nearly all indistinguishable, fatuous men with cropped goatees and dull stares, headed up by a swaggering police chief (Don Johnson) who drawls that he wouldn’t cut a guy a break for “eee-ternal life and a catfish sandwich.”But today, and with pointed reason, Saulnier has cast Aaron Pierre, a Black actor, as Terry, a former Marine who is simply pedaling a bicycle when he gets stopped and frisked. The officers, played by Emory Cohen and David Denman, confiscate the cash Terry’s carrying to bail out his cousin (C.J. LeBlanc) who’s been arrested on a weed possession charge, plus a few extra dollars Terry intended to use to buy a new truck. Here, as in the real world, “civil forfeiture,” the seizure of money or property from people who have not been charged with or convicted of a crime, is extra income for police departments. (Terry’s situation, not an uncommon one, mirrors an incident reported in The New York Times in 2021.)The local judge (James Cromwell) won’t help, and the court’s bail collector (Steve Zissis) is unswayed by Terry’s argument that the money to free his cousin is already in the building. (“This is surreal!” Terry sputters.) No one mentions race, not for a long while, and no one has to. The tension is in the cops’ confidence that they can do anything they want to Terry, in how doggedly he remains civil, long past the point where we want him to lose his cool. In one scene, he even appears to bring them doughnuts.Terry will snap, but the dominant mood isn’t revenge — it’s futility. The recent push for increased oversight of law enforcement is folded into the story, yet the fixes haven’t helped. One plot point centers on when a cruiser’s dashboard camera starts recording, and there’s a running gag about the linguistic shift from “nonlethal” to “less-lethal” weapons that hammers home the idea that the damage hasn’t changed, only the veneer. But the script resorts to a go-there, get-the-thing structure that sends Terry and his only supporter, a scrappy low-level court employee named Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), skulking around to obtain taped evidence of police abuse. Given the unshakable mood of cynicism, it’s hard to get very invested in their quest — especially when we’re already aware of so many similar videos that haven’t changed a thing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Genius: MLK/X’ Offers Portraits of the Icons as Vital Young Men

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      “We wanted to take them off the T-shirts and make them real,” said Gina Prince-Bythewood, who created the series with her husband Reggie Rock Bythewood.The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are among American history’s most thoroughly chronicled figures, their voices and mannerisms captured forever on recording after recording, their lives picked over in book after book.By himself, Malcolm X has been the subject of two Pulitzer-winning biographies in the past 13 years and just last year Jonathan Eig’s “King: A Life” landed a spot on Barack Obama’s yearly best-books list. Both men adorn countless T-shirts, posters and memes. They aren’t just people; they’re also symbols — of civil rights, of social progress, of a decade that saw many of its heroes murdered.But symbols don’t make for particularly compelling drama. So when Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Aaron Pierre signed on to play King and Malcolm X, respectively, in the new National Geographic series “Genius: MLK/X,” which premiered earlier this month, they knew their imperative was to make their iconic characters as human as possible and leave more famous portrayals in the past.“The first thing I had to do, and the first thing I needed everyone around me to do, was to stop speaking about them as icons,” Harrison said in a video interview last month alongside Pierre. “I had to live in the moment that they existed. They did not know who they were or where they were going.”Gina Prince-Bythewood, who, with her husband, Reggie Rock Bythewood, are among the executive producers of the series, put it this way: “We wanted to take them off the T-shirts and make them real and tangible for an audience. And to do that, you need to show their humanity.”Jayme Lawson, as Betty Shabazz, and Pierre in “Genius.” The series emphasizes the strength and support of the men’s wives.Richard DuCree/National GeographicWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Brother’ Review: Growing Up Grieving

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      This drama about two brothers coming of age in Toronto is imbued with big emotions, but has trouble sustaining its story.Michael (Lamar Johnson), the protagonist of “Brother,” is a quiet teen often unsure of himself, a trait that is particularly pronounced as he moves through the world next to Francis (Aaron Pierre), his self-possessed and physically imposing older brother. Michael’s coming-of-age story takes place in the shadow of Francis, who wants Michael to learn how to better carry himself. The two teenagers, both Black, are growing up in a poor, largely immigrant neighborhood of Toronto’s Scarborough district.Written and directed by the Canadian filmmaker Clement Virgo and based on a novel of the same name by David Chariandy, the film flits across time, mostly between Michael as a high schooler, when he follows Francis around Scarborough, and 10 years later, long after tragedy has struck, when Michael has been left to care for their grieving mother, Ruth (Marsha Stephanie Blake).Shot with a moody, stylized palette and backed by a stirring score, Virgo’s work has the pieces of what it so desperately strives to be: a poignant coming-of-age drama about masculinity, the traps and the fragility of it; about grief; and about the social realities of a certain Black immigrant experience. At times it can be. But it becomes fixated on imbuing itself with solemnity, rather than organically earning it. The ultimately sparse dramatic elements here feel more suited to a short film; in a feature-length production, they become too thin to support the big feelings and weighty themes the movie wants to leave us with.BrotherNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More