Quinton Aaron is a big man who plays small. In The Blind Side he answers questions plainly, watches, and waits, and he does more with a folded blanket than the script ever does with him. One film made him, and the parts since have not asked for much more.
Fi1m perspective
A boy in a T-shirt and shorts on a dark Memphis road in November. A woman in a car asks where he is going. He says the gym, because it is warm. That exchange is the whole of Quinton Aaron's method: no plea, no shiver for the camera, no glance to see if we are watching. He answers the question. The next morning the borrowed bedding is folded on the couch and he is gone, and the shot works without him in it, which tells you how much he had already put there.
He came to the part with almost nothing behind him. There was an NYU student short, guest spots on Law & Order, and a first film as Q in Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind (2008). Then John Lee Hancock cast him as Michael Oher in The Blind Side (2009) opposite Sandra Bullock, and for most people who know his face that is still the sum of him. What followed was television guest work and supporting parts in smaller films: Simon in Left Behind (2014), a coach in Greater (2016), the lead as Byron in Halfway (2016), a drama about a man out of prison. We have not reviewed them and will not pretend to a view.
What we can speak to is the stillness. Aaron stands 6 ft 8 in, and critics keep noticing the same thing about him that we did: the size, and the refusal to use it. He plays Michael with his shoulders in and his eyes doing the work, on perhaps a dozen lines of any length across 129 minutes. We were moved by that roadside scene more than the film's manner had led us to expect, and the reason is his flatness. The boy asks for nothing, so we find ourselves asking on his behalf. We were also cross, because when the film finally needs Michael to come good on the field it sends Bullock out to talk him into it, and Aaron had already shown he could carry the moment alone.
That is Hancock's choice, not Aaron's failing, but it has shaped how he is seen. The word attached to his performance is that it complements the lead, and it does, and that is also the trap. An actor who is good at reacting gets cast to react.
He knows it. "I'm not just a big 6-foot-8 black guy. I'm an actor. I can do multiple things," he has said, and he has taken parts as a cowboy, a doctor and a poker player to prove it. We would like to see the film that lets him. On the evidence in front of us he is a fine listener whom nobody has yet trusted with the speech.
Biography
Quinton Aaron is an American actor. He was born on 15 August 1984 in The Bronx, New York City.
Aaron made his feature film debut in Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind (2008). His first lead role came the following year as Michael Oher in The Blind Side (2009).
He has since appeared in films including Left Behind (2014) and Greater (2016), and in television series such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, One Tree Hill and Drop Dead Diva.
