Asante Blackk's screen career opens with the hardest thing a young actor can be asked to do: sit in a room and be frightened without showing it off. On the evidence of When They See Us, he can. What else he can do remains open.
Fi1m perspective
The moment we remember from When They See Us is a question. Kevin Richardson, fourteen, has just written out a confession to a crime he did not commit, at the direction of the police officers questioning him, and he asks whether he can go home now. Asante Blackk does not play it for pity. He plays it as a boy who has followed the rules as they were explained to him and expects the reward. We were angry watching it, and stayed angry for a day, and a good part of that was the reasonableness in his voice.
It was his first screen part. He had been acting since he was six, in school plays and then high-school productions, and a workshop at the Howard Theatre got him an agent; Ava DuVernay's series (2019) took him from the stage to a camera without the stiffness stage actors usually bring to a first close-up. In the same year he became a series regular on This Is Us as Malik Hodges, a part that ran until 2022, and in 2023 he made two features, Landscape with Invisible Hand as Adam Campbell and Story Ave as Kadir Grayson, neither of which we have yet reviewed.
What DuVernay saw in him is easy to name. Her editors, Spencer Averick, Terilyn A. Shropshire and Michelle Tesoro, cut the first episode between five interrogation rooms, so each boy gets a few seconds at a time and has to make them count. Caleel Harris's Antron has his father, Michael K. Williams's Bobby, telling him to give the police what they want. Blackk's Kevin is handed the other boys' names as if they were already friends, and he does less with them than anyone: he sits, he listens, he writes. It is a stage actor's discipline, staying still while the scene comes to you, and on screen, where the camera is close enough to watch the boys' hands, it reads as terror kept under.
The caveat is that we have seen him mostly frightened. He has said he brought some of himself to Kevin and set out, with Malik, to build someone completely the opposite of himself, which is the right instinct for a young actor who might otherwise be asked to play wounded boys for a decade; the reviews of his early films have wondered, mildly, how much further he can go. We do not know yet either. Fear he can do, and the kind of decency that gets a child into trouble. The interesting film will be the one in which nobody is threatening him and he has to hold the frame with nothing but what he wants.
Biography
Asante Blackk is an American actor. Born Asante Duah Ma'at on 20 October 2001 in Waldorf, Maryland, he began acting as a child, with an early role as Mowgli in a school production of The Jungle Book. One of his first professional appearances was in a production at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC.
Blackk gained recognition for portraying the teenage Kevin Richardson in the 2019 Netflix miniseries When They See Us, directed by Ava DuVernay, earning a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. He subsequently appeared as a series regular playing Malik Hodges in the NBC drama This Is Us (2019–2022) and made his feature film debut in Landscape with Invisible Hand (2023). He is the nephew of actress Samira Wiley.
