Bashir Salahuddin brings steadiness and dry humour to supporting parts without competing for attention. We value that restraint, though the comedies he makes with Diallo Riddle give him more to do than his films generally allow.
Fi1m perspective
Beside Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), Bashir Salahuddin looks like someone with a job to do. As Hondo, Maverick’s trusted crew chief, he gives the film a dependable colleague without competing for attention. We warmed to him because he makes that dependability feel useful and human, rather than merely a way of getting the lead to his next scene. Joseph Kosinski’s film gets its physical excitement from the cockpit footage shot by Claudio Miranda. Salahuddin’s quieter contribution is to make the people supporting Maverick seem worth some attention too.
His comic timing has a substantial apprenticeship behind it: writing for Chocolate News (2008), then four years on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Supporting film roles followed in the late 2010s, but television gave him more say in what he played. With writing partner Diallo Riddle, he co-created South Side (2019) and Sherman’s Showcase (2019), starring as Officer Goodnight and Sherman McDaniels respectively. One concerns Black working life in Chicago; the other spoofs the music-variety programmes of the 1970s and 1980s. These are better places to look for his comic interests than the useful men in uniform that films tend to ask him to play.
Cyrano (2021) makes the limitations of that film work clearer. Salahuddin plays Le Bret in Joe Wright’s musical, but the part offers less room than the character-led television he helps create. Peter Dinklage carries the hurt in a film whose songs are uneven and whose decoration can get in the way. We rate it, with those reservations, but it would be a poor place to start if the object were to discover what Salahuddin can do.
The reservation is about opportunity as much as performance. Grounded authority and dry humour are useful qualities, but repeated casting can make an actor seem narrower than the work he writes for himself. Top Gun: Maverick uses his steadiness well; Cyrano leaves less to assess. Start with Hondo for the supporting actor, then try the television made with Riddle before deciding that dependable is all he does.
Biography
Bashir Salahuddin is an American actor, writer and comedian. Born on 30 June 1976 in Chicago, Illinois, he graduated from Harvard University with a BS before entering the entertainment industry.
Salahuddin began his career as a writer, contributing to Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and co-creating the Comedy Central series South Side (2019–2022) with Diallo Riddle. His acting roles include Detective Summervile in A Simple Favor (2018), a director in Marriage Story (2019), Big Joe in The 24th (2020) and Bernie 'Hondo' Coleman in Top Gun: Maverick (2022). He is married to actress Chandra Russell.
