Barkhad Abdi

Muse gives an order as though he cannot risk hearing a question in return. In Captain Phillips (2013), Barkhad Abdi makes the effort behind that certainty visible: his character needs to be obeyed, and needs others to believe he expects nothing else. The threat is convincing because he never seems comfortably in charge. We can see the desperation without being asked to excuse the violence. That is a substantial achievement for a part that could so easily have been reduced to menace.

Paul Greengrass gets much of the tension from Abdi’s exchanges with Tom Hanks, each man testing how much confidence the other has left. We found them unnerving because Abdi makes every order sound liable to be challenged. Hanks’s Phillips has his own uncertainties, though the men’s immediate circumstances are hardly equal. Billy Ray’s screenplay is weaker when it spells out the comparison between their lives. The opening explains too much; Abdi is more persuasive when he simply shows us the strain of keeping control.

Captain Phillips was his acting debut, followed by a career largely in supporting parts. Those include the military thriller Eye in the Sky (2015) and the Safdie brothers’ Good Time (2017), in which he plays Dash, a park security guard. He also plays Doc Badger in Blade Runner 2049 (2017). These are smaller opportunities than Muse, and we would hesitate to judge the extent of his abilities from them.

Abdi has frequently been cast in roles drawing on Somali or East African experience, often involving conflict or marginalisation. We would be wary of treating that pattern as proof of what he cannot play, just as a persuasive debut cannot answer every question about an actor. Muse gives us good reason for confidence: Abdi makes a dangerous man’s insecurity clear without stopping a thriller to explain it. We would welcome a leading part that did not require him to frighten anyone.