There is at least one scene in every André Holland movie when the camera simply feels entranced by his gaze. It is a look that blends a sense of empathy and reflection, sometimes tinged with the doubt or even frustration of honestly confronting the full weight of a moment.
That ability to connect helped make Holland a familiar face in work like the historical cable TV medical drama “The Knick” and the Oscar-winning “Moonlight.” But the actor now enters a fresh spotlight in an unusually busy past year. He stars in two films, “The Revisionist” and “They Fight,” premiering at this year’s Tribeca Festival, which runs Wednesday through June 14. These follow a gallery of intricately imagined roles, including one last year as an amnesiac piecing together his past in Duke Johnson’s “The Actor.”
“It does feel like a beautiful flowering of things, and I’m grateful for it,” Holland said in an interview from his home in New York, where he’d just returned from shooting a film in Brussels with the French director Arnaud Desplechin and performing in Venice.
In Alex Vlack’s “The Revisionist,” Holland plays a struggling writer who seizes the chance to interview a friend’s father, a legendary author (Dustin Hoffman), to the friend’s consternation. “They Fight,” an underdog sports drama directed by Sheldon Candis, stars Holland as a youth boxing coach in Washington, D.C., pulling himself together after a stint in prison.
“The Revisionist,” which also stars Alison Brie as a successful writer and his friend’s wife, gives Holland the chance to spar with Hoffman. In “They Fight,” Holland’s character coaches teenage students while trying to heed the counsel of his boss, played by Wendell Pierce. Holland faithfully takes us through each character’s detours and iffy decisions.
“That’s something I always try to find in the character. Even if they get it wrong, they’re getting it wrong while on the way to getting it right,” he said.
Holland’s approach as an actor has garnered respect among colleagues. Pierce also worked with Holland in “Selma” and wrote in an email: “André is an actor that brings a powerful grace and intelligence to the screen.” Brie said in a statement that Holland was “a dream to work with” and “able to infuse his character with so much history and depth.”
Zazie Beetz, who starred opposite Holland in “High Flying Bird” and “The Dutchman,” referenced the actor’s luminous gaze.
“André, in his eyes, just carries empathy. His whole energy makes you care for him,” Beetz said in a phone interview from Australia where she was shooting a new movie.
Surprisingly, though, he wasn’t always sure he could be a leading man.
“I had always wanted to play leads, and for a long time I had a doubt about whether or not I would be able to,” Holland said.
One solution was to try to make his own opportunities happen. “High Flying Bird” grew out of something Holland had pitched to the film’s director, Steven Soderbergh, about baseball’s Negro Leagues. He had given Soderbergh a copy of “The Revolt of the Black Athlete,” by Harry Edwards, and later suggested the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney to write the screenplay (before the McCraney won an Oscar for “Moonlight”).
“He understands the business well enough to know, ‘I can’t wait around for people to offer me roles that I think I ought to be playing,’” Soderbergh said in a phone interview. “And I think he can do anything.”
But for Holland’s most recent era to bloom, it took a movie coming at the right time in his life. “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” the directorial feature debut in 2024 of the artist Titus Kaphar, stars Holland as a painter coming to terms with the behavior of his father. The parent-child story arose as Holland’s own father was very sick.
“It really called on me to put all of myself into it,” Holland recalled. “I was terrified to do it, but looking at it now, it’s one of the things I’m most proud of.”
Holland, 46, was born in Bessemer, Ala., where his grandfather was a preacher and his mother enrolled him in drama classes. His family owned a funeral home next to the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the target of a 1963 bombing by the Ku Klux Klan. He grew up hearing stories about loved ones participating in the civil rights movement.
Holland’s own engagement with history is reflected in his choices of films, from “Exhibiting Forgiveness” to “Moonlight” and beyond. Candis, the “They Fight” director, described him to the Times as an essential “communicator of the Black male experience in contemporary America.”
Holland’s recent travels include several days of acting during the Venice Biennale preview, in “Minor Music at the End of the World,” Saidiya Hartman’s stage adaptation of her essays. Holland’s performance, the first of three parts in Hartman’s exploration of Black life, involves a 40-minute monologue and multiple characters.
During a phone interview, Hartman spoke of Holland’s capacity to tap into the Black intellectual tradition of works that are both cultural analysis and deeply felt first-person statements.
“He has the ability to make us realize that these stories are flesh and blood. They’re literally a matter of life and death, and they’ve shaped the modern world,” Hartman said. She quoted one famous attendee of the Venice performance, the artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, who gave a succinct and profound bit of praise: “He actually deeply cares” about what’s at stake.
Holland’s forthcoming year could include projects like Johnson’s adaptation of the George Saunders novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” alongside Tom Hanks and, he hopes, an adaptation of Monica West’s “Revival Season.” Outside of film, Holland is renovating a defunct movie theater in his hometown and aims to build on the master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School he earned while filming “The Revisionist.”
For the actor, it’s all consistent with exploring ideas and turning that unmistakable gaze toward the world through his work.
“The more I’m in dialogue with people who know so much more, the clearer I get about what I want my own impact to be,” he said.
The post Looking at the World Through André Holland’s Eyes appeared first on New York Times.
