From Mufasa to Lanterns: Aaron Pierre’s Movies & TV Shows, in Order
Aaron Pierre has been lighting up our screens this month with his performance as John Stewart in Lanterns.
Similar to what that character has been through by the time we meet him on the DCU show, it’s already been a bit of a journey for the 32-year-old. Since breaking out with his remarkable turn in Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad to his effortless shift into big-screen roles with Mufasa and Rebel Ridge, he’s already staked his claim as one of Hollywood’s next major leading men — and with Star Wars: Starfighter and Man of Tomorrow (in which he’ll reprise his role as Stewart) coming our way in 2027, that ascendancy looks likely to happen sooner rather than later.
Whether you bought Pierre stocks in the early days or are coming to his back catalogue for the first time here, the range of parts that he's played so far in his relatively short career is still astonishing. Read on for a little more info on the actor’s eight essential roles and where to watch them.
If you’re a stickler for the canon, you might be a little alarmed to hear that Aaron Pierre's first major role was in David S. Goyer’s Krypton, a short-lived pre-DCU show that aired on the Syfy channel at the end of the 2010s and took place on Superman's home planet.
The series takes place 200 years before Kal-El's birth and focuses on his grandfather Sag-El’s efforts to restore the family name. Pierre, who was just 24 when the first season aired, plays Dev-Em, a former commander and one of the series’ chief bad guys.
Pierre’s first genuinely big break — as in, the moment when casting agents started to really take notice — came in the acclaimed series The Underground Railroad in 2021, in which the actor gave an unforgettable turn as an enslaved man in 19th-century America who convinces the hero, Cora (Thuso Mbedu), to escape with him.
The 10-episode show was inspired by Colson Whitehead's 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and directed by the Oscar-winning Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk). It also boasted an all-star cast featuring Joel Edgerton, Peter Mullan and Will Poulter. As projects to break out on go, they really don’t make them more prestigious than that.
The same year as Railroad, Pierre made his first big-screen appearance in Old — a slightly underappreciated gem from Mr Twist himself, M. Night Shyamalan.
The plot is as batshit as anything in the filmmaker's recent career: a group of people on a mysterious beach that makes them age really fast — because hey, why the hell not?
If you vibe with the director’s goofier stuff (think more Trap or The Happening), you should give it a try.
A fan favourite at both TIFF and the London Film Festival in 2022, Brother is a movie about the Toronto hip-hop scene's early years, told through the eyes of two second-generation Caribbean immigrants played by Pierre and Lamar Johnson (who you'll probably know for playing Henry in The Last of Us).
Despite that early buzz, it ended up going a bit under the radar at the time. If you like smart, music-forward indies like Eden or Summer of Soul, you should definitely seek it out.
Thanks to its melancholy and downbeat sci-fi tone, Foe is probably the quietest movie Pierre has been involved in. It’s also one of the more interesting.
Starring Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan (together for the first time on screen), it follows a young married couple as they struggle to make things work after Mescal’s character is drafted to work on a space station — classic.
For Foe, Pierre was cast in another villain role — this time as a mysterious stranger who arrives to deliver the bad news, and perhaps worse. If you like sad-core science fiction like High Life or Ad Astra, this one might be up your alley.
If lean, mean revenge romps are more your thing, no movie in recent memory has nailed that blueprint quite as cleanly as Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge — a gigantic streaming hit in 2024 that turned Pierre from an indie darling into a bona fide action star overnight.
The story follows a man who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, specifically a small town that’s under the thumb of a racist mayor and police force.
Naturally, as you might have already guessed, they quickly realise they’ve messed with the wrong guy.
If voice roles have never specifically been your thing, it says something about the commanding timbre of Pierre’s that he was cast as a young Mufasa in the prequel film to Disney’s photorealistic remake of its own bona fide ‘90s classic, The Lion King.
The role had, of course, originally been played by the great James Earl Jones, who reprised it again for that hugely successful reimagining. However, the Mouse House needed fresh blood for the younger version of the character — and luckily for Pierre, his old pal Barry Jenkins had been hired to direct...
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After less than a decade in the industry, Pierre has already enjoyed a hugely eclectic career. If one notable kind of role was missing from his CV before Genius, however, it was playing a real-life figure.
That's exactly what he got to do in Season 4 of the show as Malcolm X, the civil rights leader who was assassinated in 1965, a few months shy of his 40th birthday, and who Denzel Washington played so brilliantly in Spike Lee's epic 1992 biopic.
Up to that point, the National Geographic-produced show had focused on one historical figure per season, starting with Albert Einstein (Geoffrey Rush), then Pablo Picasso (Antonio Banderas) and finally Aretha Franklin (Cynthia Erivo) before Pierre got his shot.
It was a daunting trio of acts to follow, but Pierre proved himself up to the task.
