Jojo T. Gibbs

For most of Dogman (2023) Jojo T. Gibbs sits across a table from Caleb Landry Jones in a flat grey interview room and asks him the next question. Luc Besson tells the whole story from that cell, so his editor, Julien Rey, has to cut back to her face every few minutes, and what he finds there is always the same: patient, still, giving nothing away. It is the least showy job in the film and she does it without once reaching for our attention. Steadiness is what she is hired for, and it is starting to limit her.

She did not start out steady. Gibbs began in stand-up around 2014, co-created a web series in Los Angeles, and got her first lead from it: Hattie in Twenties (2020–2021), Lena Waithe's series about a queer aspiring television writer. The comic timing came from the clubs and the series is where it shows. Then films came, and films have used her differently. In Fresh (2022) she is Mollie, the heroine's best friend. In Past Lives (2023) she is Janice, a part cut down to a non-speaking appearance. In Dogman she is the psychiatrist; in Civil War (2024) she is a sergeant. Each is a supporting role, and each asks her to keep her voice level while someone else has the crisis.

She is good at level. In Dogman Jones is doing everything, wig, dress, blood, Piaf, and the scenes where the film lets him sit still opposite her are the ones where he is quietly good, because she gives him someone worth confessing to. We spent much of the film wishing Besson would stay in that room longer, and were surprised, given how thin the picture is elsewhere, by how much we wanted to watch a woman simply listen. But she is handed nothing but questions, and a performance built entirely of reactions can only be as good as the thing it reacts to. Besson's later scenes, dark and bloody and hard to follow, leave her with less and less to do.

So the film record so far shows a steady, unshowy actor of the kind directors reach for when they need someone to hold the frame still while a bigger performance goes off next to it. That is honest work and she does it cleanly. It is not what she trained for. For the comedian, go to Twenties. For the actor she might become, wait for a director who trusts her with the punchline as well as the pause.