Kara Young

Watch Kara Young's hands in Is God Is (2026). Racine is the twin who wants the killing, and Young never lets her rest: fingers drumming, reaching for food, worrying at whatever is loose in the car, and then a grin that arrives a second before the violence does. It is a performance built out of motion. Mallori Johnson's Anaia keeps asking whether they have to go through with it; Young's Racine has already answered and is looking for the keys.

She got there from the stage, and slowly. Young made her debut at the Public Theater in 2016, joined LAByrinth Theater Company the following year and built her name off-Broadway before Clyde's (2021) took her to Broadway, with Purlie Victorious (2023) and Purpose (2025) after it. Screen work ran alongside in small parts: Chemical Hearts (2020), Master (2022), then Jones in Boots Riley's series I'm a Virgo (2023). The two films of 2026 are the first time cinema has given her anything like the space the theatre had.

Only one of them uses it. Riley cast her again in I Love Boosters (2026) as a character credited as Crying Black Mother, and she gets one scene that is exactly as funny as the name suggests and no more. That is how Riley works, jokes about systems with the people as labels, and it is no mark against her that a label cannot be played for depth. Aleshea Harris, adapting the play, does the opposite: she writes Racine and Anaia as two people who have only ever had each other and are not sure that was enough, and Young plays that doubt underneath all the forward motion. The scenes between the sisters on the drive west, sharing food, needling each other, going quiet, moved us more than the plot had any right to, and Young's part in that is the stillness, which she holds back until it counts.

The stage habit shows on screen. She is small and is often cast younger than she is, and she reads as someone who has been told to keep her hands still and has decided not to. Directors with an argument to make have found her useful, Riley twice, Harris once, and the risk is that she becomes a reliable piece of somebody else's point. Is God Is shows what happens when a writer gives her a sister and a car instead of a caption. We would like more directors to do what Harris did: write her a person and get out of the way.