Imagine a young James Earl Jones, Darth Vader himself, if he was from south London. That’s how smooth and chill Aaron Pierre, 30-year-old actor and star of Netflix hit Rebel Ridge, sounds when he fixes you with his sea-green eyes and tells you how his day’s been going: “I’m still working myself out, you know? Still learning, still growing …” That voice, in combination with those eyes, commands an audience’s attention, even in relatively small roles. Such as when he played Cassio in a 2018 production of Othello at south London’s Globe; or a man escaping slavery alongside Thuso Mbedu in Prime Video’s 2021 Golden Globe-winning series The Underground Railroad.
The voice-eyes combo also marks Pierre out as a natural heir to Earl Jones, the veteran actor whose seven-decade career included the original Star Wars movies, as well as voicing Simba’s stern-but-loving father Mufasa in the animated Lion King movie back in 1994. It’s a role that Pierre will step into when the latest instalment in the franchise, a prequel to the photorealistic 2019 remake of the Disney classic, comes out later this month.
There had been some talk of arranging a meeting between Pierre and his predecessor, but in the end it was not to be. On the morning of our interview, news has just broken of Jones’s death, at the age of 93. Pierre is clearly affected: “It’s deeply sad. I’ve said a number of times before, he is a hero of mine – he’s a hero of many … from his stage work to his extensive filmography to his voice work; he’s just a phenomenal artist.” There is a YouTube clip of Jones playing Troy Maxson in the original 1985 Broadway production of August Wilson’s Fences, which Pierre often finds himself returning to: “I’ve watched it more times than I can count, and I get chills every single time. He was always pursuing authenticity and achieved it every time. That’s my goal.”
Well-reviewed performances in the melancholy 2022 Canadian indie Brother and as Malcolm X in Nat Geo’s Genius series suggest that Pierre is well on the way to achieving that goal – but can he sing? This seeming side issue took on central importance one day in 2020, when Pierre’s phone buzzed with a text from his Underground Railroad director, the Oscar-winning film-maker Barry Jenkins. Pierre was in the Dominican Republic, midway through the shoot of M Night Shyamalan’s bonkers, beach-based mortality thriller Old, in which he plays the amusingly named rapper, Mid-Sized Sedan. Jenkins was busy casting Mufasa: The Lion King, and considering Pierre for the title role.
Pierre’s reply to the “Can you sing?” question was, characteristically, both self-effacing and assertive: “I mean, anyone who knows me knows that I never want to oversell,” he says now, with a shy smile and a low, self-deprecating laugh. “So I was very measured in my response. But, I will say, prior to this project, I could hold a note.”
It is Mufasa’s star composers Lin Manuel Miranda and Lebo M, however, whom he would credit with readying him for “the enormous task of a Disney song”, an altogether more challenging feat. “I’m sure there’s behind-the-scenes footage somewhere of me, in the booth in north-west London, using all the physical exercises they taught me, trying to reach those high notes and low notes, and I’m [doing the] throwing the imaginary tennis ball [technique], and all this stuff.”
Belting out show tunes is a newly acquired skill, then, but Pierre felt rather better prepared when it came to evoking the spirit of a young lion prince on the Serengeti. “I can watch David Attenborough documentaries for hours. I’ve always been really into that,” he says, before excitedly recalling his own foray into the form. “I got my first opportunity to narrate last year [on BBC documentary Big Little Journeys] and it was so fun, I’m really hoping they do another. Just watching these beautiful, smaller animals go about their daily business.”
Here he offers a taster of his skills: “This really tiny animal, that’s maybe three centimetres long, has to cross this highway, where there are like, 16-wheeler lorries …”, setting the perilous scene with such evident concern for small mammals and their travails that it seems almost a shame his career has now progressed beyond nature docs. The Mufasa role, in which he leads a cast featuring Beyoncé, Seth Rogan and Donald Glover, signifies his ascent to a new level of stardom.
Earlier in life, however, Pierre had a different career in mind. When he was growing up in west Croydon, the eldest of three children, in a family of mixed Jamaican, Curaçaoan and Sierra Leonean descent, he “wanted to be the fastest man in the world … and [American sprinter] Maurice Greene was the world record-holder at that time.” This was one hero Pierre would get the opportunity to meet. He spotted the athlete in the street in London, while out with his parents. “This was before the time of iPhones and selfies. I was like: ‘Mum! It’s Maurice Greene!’ So she went in her pocket and brought out, like, a Lidl receipt, or something, and I ran up to him, and got his autograph.”
This scrap of paper remained among Pierre’s most treasured possessions for several years, but eventually he lost it – still a source of regret – and discovered a new passion: the stage. “The secondary school I attended didn’t offer drama as a subject, but they did one play every three years.” So Pierre auditioned for the school production of Moby Dick and landed “a really small narrator role”. On account of his sonorous voice? “No, I didn’t yet have a deep voice. I wasn’t tall, either. I was really nervous. But, I walked out on to the stage, and I said my lines, and I remember getting backstage again and just being like: ‘That was one of the most energising experiences I’ve ever had.’”
These days, post growth-spurt and voice-drop, there’s no trace of nervous energy in the 6ft 3in actor’s demeanour, but the wonderment is still there. He has it any time he talks about his own art or anyone else’s. While his first professional acting gigs were bit-parts on British TV (Prime Suspect, The A Word), it’s early stage roles he considers most foundational; playing Cassio in Othello at the Globe (which is where Barry Jenkins first spotted him) and getting his own go at an August Wilson play, in King Hedley II, opposite Sir Lenny Henry. “Our theatre community at home is so very beautiful,” he says.
And, like his brooding 90s B-boy character in Brother, Pierre is also a collector of classic jazz and R&B albums on vinyl: “Arguably unnecessarily, I have two record players, both of which I adore and love.” Current favourites include Marvin Gaye and Ella Fitzgerald’s Autumn in New York. So while he insists he’s also a big fan of rapper J Cole, Pierre comes off like an old soul who appreciates life’s simple pleasures. Such as a comforting bowl of porridge in the morning: “If I’ve had porridge, it’s a good day.”
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Yet he does retain one aspect of the sprinter’s mentality: that focus on the finish line. This served him well when Rebel Ridge landed on Netflix this past September and a buzz began to build. Not so much around the film itself – a taut, tidy action-thriller – but around Pierre’s star-making performance. In a fateful sequence of events, Star Wars actor John Boyega had originally been set to play Rebel Ridge’s lead, but dropped out due to “family reasons”, leading to Pierre’s last-minute casting as Terry Richmond, the even-keeled ex-marine who faces off against a corrupt, small-town Louisiana police force.
Even in the film’s most explosively violent action sequences, Pierre plays Richmond with a restraint and calmness that is both striking in the revenge thriller genre and – perhaps more importantly – true to the character’s real-world context, operating as he does within the racially fraught US justice system. When the credits rolled, you could almost hear the smack of Gucci loafers hitting asphalt, as Hollywood execs raced to sign him up for the next multimillion-dollar-IP-comic-book-superhero-action franchise.
This is a prospect that suits Pierre just fine: “I’m all for it,” he says, with a secret smile that only later makes sense. “During Rebel Ridge, there wasn’t one day that I didn’t have at least a bruise or a cut, or a mark or feeling sore and I loved that. I relished how physical this role was, and I’m all for doing that more and more.” A few weeks after our interview, the trade papers report on his casting as the lead in the new, highly anticipated HBO adaptation of DC’s Green Lantern comics. So clearly there will be more.
Is that it, then? Have we lost Pierre to Hollywood, before we even really knew him? Now he’s nailed various North American accents, will his native west Croydon ever again be spoken on screen? Pierre hears out these concerns, then arranges his face into a look of semi-serious admonishment: “Listen. My community will never lose me, and I will never lose my community. It is deeply embedded in the DNA of who I am.” He’s not worried about it and neither should we be.
“I’m specific about what I engage with. Things have to be undeniable. And if they’re not, I’m very happy to just, y’know … go about my very mundane life, and enjoy my porridge.” Maybe this is the truth underlying every Aaron Pierre performance to date: There’s a difference between being calm and being a pushover.
Mufasa: The Lion King is in cinemas from Friday.
