André Holland, Artist and Agent of Change

Whether the room is a theater, a film studio, or the Angelika Cinema in New York for a post-screening conversation for his latest film, The Actor (2025). Within seconds of appearing before the audience, he has them in the palm of his hand. The room becomes animated with excitement and questions. When he urges them to “tell a friend” about the movie, there are numerous responses of “I got you.” 

In The Actor, based on the novel Memory (2010) by Donald E. Westlake and adapted for the screen and directed by Duke Johnson, Holland plays an actor suffering from amnesia and trying to piece together his identity. In a case of life imitating art, the role came to him when he was doubting himself. His father passed away right before he was scheduled to start working on the film. “I questioned who I really was. I always understood where my place in the world was in relation to him. When that was gone, I found myself feeling confused,” Holland reflects. “At the same time, I was playing a character who’s trying to figure out who he is and where home is for him. Do I want to be who I’ve been or do I want to be somebody else?” He made it through the shoot and now views the role as a cathartic gift: “It gave me a place to put those feelings. But it was also difficult to be so personally close to what the character was feeling.” 

Holland has always been very close to his family. His mother instilled in him a love for theater by taking him to local productions in Bessemer, Alabama, where he grew up. With her help, he’s paying that forward by renovating a theater in his hometown. “We didn’t have any arts programming,” he says. “The theater that we’re restoring was the place where Black people could go and see movies.” That notion of giving back extends to how he chooses his roles: “I’m always attracted to projects that are often historical, that are relevant to the struggles we’re dealing with today. Artists have always been connected to social transformation, like Paul Robeson and Harry Belafonte.” Holland would like to be a “change agent” and actively engage with his community through his work. As he puts it: “We learn how to be good artists, but we don’t always learn how to be good change agents. And then we end up in these situations where all these people are looking at us with a microphone in our face.” Holland believes artists have a responsibility in the societies in which they live and work. “The ability to have empathy for another human being is essentially a creative act of imagination. Good artists can also imagine futures that other people may not be able to see,” he says. 

Connecting with that artistic responsibility is why he recently enrolled at Harvard University for a master’s degree in theology. Holland graduated from NYU in 2006 with a Master of Fine Arts. “They teach you a lot about acting, but the thing that oftentimes conservatories don’t teach is political education,” he says. He wanted a different education at this juncture in his life: “School has given me an opportunity to think more deeply about the historical and political grounding of being an artist. Theological work has been really fascinating, too.” Holland grew up in the church; his grandfather was a preacher. “My father was called to the ministry, though he didn’t ultimately become a minister. I’ve always felt this desire to tend to vulnerable people in my community and other vulnerable communities across the world,” he says. This juncture in Holland’s life is giving him the chance to figure out how to do just that. 

Acting continues to be a major part of Holland’s life mission. Almost a decade after the release of 2016’s Moonlight, his breakout role in it remains a performance that still has a hold on the cultural memory. As Kevin, a confidant and possible love interest for the lead character of Chiron, Holland shows a more tender version of on-screen masculinity. “I was trying to think about what’s happening between these two people, what I personally understood about that moment that I can lend to the character. Chiron needed softness and care. So I gave Kevin my sensitivity to help him navigate that relationship,” he says. 

Holland seems bemused that a shot of him exhaling cigarette smoke has become a popular meme. It’s a fleeting moment that captures that sensitivity. “There is a technician in me, too. Once I get the emotional story, I think about how I can tell that in pictures,” he says. For him, that can be through costume, gesture, or a prop. “The toothpick that Kevin holds was something I insisted on,” he says, “because I wanted someplace to put the character’s anxiety. He can’t say everything that he’s feeling, and when we feel more than we have liberty to say, we behave in certain ways that reveal that.”

The success of Moonlight could have been an entry point that led to more starring roles for Holland. Besides a role in the Netflix series The Eddy (2020), he hasn’t been a lead in almost a decade. The reason becomes obvious when looking back at Hollywood’s history: Black actors are rarely afforded the same opportunities as their white counterparts after such a breakout role. “Things changed to a degree,” he says. “It gave me more visibility and access that I may otherwise have not gotten. I got invited to some cool parties, which was fun. I got some jobs as a result of it. But did it launch me into some stratosphere or change my career in a material way? No.” 

Last year, Holland collaborated with artist and filmmaker Titus Kaphar for Exhibiting Forgiveness, a family drama inspired by Kaphar’s traumatic relationship with a drug-addicted father. That film seemed primed to put his career into second gear post-Moonlight. “I’m proud of that film,” he says. “Everything in it ain’t perfect, but it’s real. The acting is really strong. It deserved a lot better than what it got. At Sundance, the reviews were positive across the board. People said they see it as an awards contender, but then when it came down to actually doing a deal for a seller, where is everybody that was so excited? Same [when] it was time to market the movie.” 

That breakout chance may finally come this year. Audiences will see Holland as the lead in three movies. In addition to The Actor, he’ll star in the adaptation of Amiri Baraka’s seminal play Dutchman. That film, which premiered at South by Southwest in March, sets the 1964 play in contemporary times and adds more characters and situations to its short, 30-minute running time. In the play, Clay, a reserved, upwardly mobile politician, gets entangled with a volatile and manipulative white woman, Lula. The movie gives more dimension to Clay (Holland’s character) by showing not only his involvement with Lula (Kate Mara), but also his strained marriage with Zazie Beetz’s Kaya. Their therapy session with a psychologist played by Stephen McKinley Henderson breaks the fourth wall so he can comment on the proceedings. 

This September brought the release of his third film, Love, Brooklyn, which he also produced. In it, Holland brings that sensitivity that has served him so well, albeit within a more traditional framework—a contemporary romantic drama. His character is at the center of a love triangle, choosing between an old flame he can’t quite let go of (Nicole Beharie) and a young widow (DeWanda Wise) still grieving while raising a daughter. “There’s an audience for these kinds of love stories,” he says. “It’s about people in their early 40s and late 30s who are still trying to figure out their romantic lives.” This type of film’s heyday was in the 1990s, and as Holland puts it, “mostly with white people” as its stars, though Black love did thrive in movies like Love Jones (1997) and The Best Man (1999). Holland hopes that Love, Brooklyn will bring that vibe back. “What would it be like to have beautiful Black people sitting in coffee shops and having conversations with their friends about their love lives—where there’s no trauma, no violence, and no ridiculousness? That feels revolutionary,” he says.

When I suggest that Black films are not viewed as artistically and commercially valid by the industry, especially for awards, Holland agrees: “There are all these parties that are happening that contenders are meant to attend, like the Academy Governor’s Awards. It costs $200,000 to get a table, and if you don’t have a company that’s willing to put that money up, you don’t get to be in the room. Who’s making these decisions as to which movies are deserving of that kind of material support? There are some that are viewed as artsy and intellectual and worthy—whatever the lens that people are viewing things through. And why are we all pretending that these things are not bought?”

Holland’s frustration is justified. His new films mark the first time he’s received top billing, and he relished the experience: “My character in The Actor is in every scene of the movie. I wanted to see what that felt like, to carry the movie like that. I felt so at home. It was exactly the kind of work I wanted to be doing. Working every day was hard, the hours were long, it was a heavy lift. But I enjoyed feeling responsible for the story.”

Holland is used to rigorous work, especially in the theater. He has tackled classics by Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Molière. That experience informs all of these performances, particularly Dutchman. He brings a modern temperament that respects the text but abandons strict adherence to it. “For a long time, I would approach any classic text with this sense of reverence, to the point where it would restrict me from giving all of myself to it. And the result is that it would be boring,” he says. The turning point happened in acting class. He was working on a scene from a classic play, and his teacher stopped him halfway through and told him, “When you are spontaneous on stage, you’re very good, and when you’re not and you try to be dutiful to the text, you recede into the scenery.”

Holland recalls that moment as a turning point that made him bring a sense of playfulness to his performances—as he did in Dutchman, despite the play’s serious themes of race and identity. “I started with a formal approach of understanding the text,” he says. “I first encountered the play in drama school, and I thought it was all emotion and anger. But coming back to it at this point, I understood it differently. Baraka wrote it at a time when there was so much political turmoil.¹ This character, Clay, is responding to a moment full of terror and violence. He feels rage, but his response is to create a piece of poetry. That long speech that ends the play, the rest of the play is built around that speech.” Holland also cherished the chance to be in conversation with a long list of Black actors: “There’s a wonderful lineage of Black actors who played that part: Stephen McKinley Henderson, who’s in the movie, Robert Hooks, Alphonso Walker Jr. I wanted to have my chance.” 

Holland thinks that identity is a common theme to all these characters: “All three films have people wrestling with trying to figure out who they really are.” And though he seems in control of his art, Holland is working to answer the same questions these characters are asking of themselves. He’s pushing himself to dig deeper, with his layered, moving portraits of everyday people trying to live and love better, and his obligations to his community. He says without hesitation, “I want to have something meaningful to say.”