Eric Kofi Abrefa

In Supacell (2024), Andre Simpson can lift a cash machine and cannot get a job interview. That is the whole part, and Eric Kofi Abrefa plays it in that order: the lifting costs him nothing, the interview costs him everything. He is a large man, and he spends most of Rapman's six episodes letting the world shrink him, a criminal record in front of him and a son behind him who has stopped expecting him to turn up. Rapman's series is best when nobody is using a power, and Abrefa is the clearest case. We minded more about whether Andre would get the job than about anything the conspiracy chasing the five of them did, because he never once plays the strength as a comfort. It is just one more thing he cannot use.

The career before it was slow. He trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and spent years in the background of other people's films: Fury (2014), Snowden (2016), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), with recurring parts in Humans and, as Noah Webster, in Harlots (2017). The stage kept him honest in the meantime; the film of the National Theatre's Julie (2018), opposite Vanessa Kirby, has him singing and dancing in a two-hander, which is not what anyone casting a gang leader would guess. Then Rapman gave him Switcher in Blue Story (2019), and the parts got bigger. Lamar Silas in BMF (2021–) is the one most people name first, an American villain sustained over several seasons. The One (2021) and Jeymes Samuel's The Book of Clarence (2023), where he is Jedediah the Terrible, followed.

The pattern is hard to miss. Switcher, Lamar, Andre: three men on the wrong side of the law, each played with a threat in the body and something sorer underneath. He is good at it, and the danger is obvious. The early years were background work, the strong performances sit in a handful of projects, and most of those have a record attached. Rapman is the director who has got the most out of him, twice now, and both times by letting him be a brother or a father first and a criminal second. Micheal Ward has shared the screen with him on both occasions, which is not a coincidence in a career built on one director's trust.

Our review of Supacell said Andre was the character we would follow into a spin-off, and we stand by it. What we would rather see is a part with no past to carry, where the quiet has to come from somewhere else. Until someone writes it, Andre will do.