Nina Moran has played one person, near enough, across a short, a feature and a series, and that person is the loudest and funniest thing in any room she skates into. Whether she can play anyone else is a question nobody has yet asked her.
Fi1m perspective
Kirt talks. In Betty (2020) she is loud, permanently stoned and full of theories, and Nina Moran delivers each one as though it has just occurred to her, because it probably has. She is the reason most people will keep watching. Around her the other four skaters are quieter and more carefully drawn; Moran is the noise, and the series would be thinner without it.
She did not train for it. Moran started skateboarding at twelve in Brooklyn, and Crystal Moselle found her and Rachelle Vinberg on the subway in 2016. Moselle put the pair and their friends in a short, That One Day (2016), in which Moran played someone called Nina; then in Skate Kitchen (2018), in which she played Kurt; then in Betty, twelve half-hours over two years, in which the same person is called Kirt and Moran was also a consultant. It is one character with three names, and the distance between the actor and the part is next to nothing.
That is the strength and it is the whole of the strength. Moran is brash, funny and quick, and she plays a young woman who does not much care whether the boys at the skate park want her there. Professional actors playing skaters look like actors who have learned to skate; Moran looks like a skater who has been handed a camera and decided to see what happens. We laughed at Kirt more than at anything else in Betty, and what did it was the delivery: a theory arriving mid-sentence, fully formed and plainly wrong, in the voice of someone who expects to be believed. It is a hard thing to fake and we are not sure she is faking it.
Which is the doubt. Moselle's method depends on non-actors being themselves, and Moran's work has been almost entirely with Moselle. Vinberg, who writes on Betty as well as playing Camille, has shown she can shape the material; Moran has only ever been the material. The ensemble around her, Dede Lovelace, Ajani Russell and Kabrina Adams, has the same history and the same limits, which is why the series is warmest when it stops trying to have plots and lets them roll through Manhattan while the light goes.
Dealing (2024), a short in which she plays someone called Kai, is the first time she has answered to a name that was not a version of her own. We have not reviewed it. But it is the right test, and we would rather watch her attempt it than watch her play Kirt a fourth time.
Biography
Nina Moran is an American actress and skateboarder. She was born on 16 December 1997 in Brooklyn, New York.
Moran is a member of the real-life Skate Kitchen crew of female skateboarders in New York City. She appeared as Kurt in the 2018 film Skate Kitchen and as Kirt in the HBO series Betty (2020–2021), both directed by Crystal Moselle and drawing on the group's experiences. She also featured in Moselle's earlier short film That One Day (2016) and later worked as a consultant on Betty.
