Yahya Abdul-Mateen II's 10 Best Movies & TV Shows, Ranked
Talented, charismatic and impossibly handsome, it’s no surprise that Yahya Abdul-Mateen II has enjoyed a steady rise in the industry since breaking out in a few choice supporting roles less than a decade ago.
In that short time, the 39-year-old has managed to work with some of the best directors around while also taking on the responsibility of reimagining some of the most iconic roles in comic books and cinema—most notably in the HBO series Watchmen and in movies like Candyman and The Matrix Resurrections.
With the actor currently earning rave reviews for his performance in Wonder Man—a show you can currently stream in its entirety over on Disney+—it feels like the right time to round up his finest performances in movies and television so far—though, with David Fincher’s The Adventures of Cliff Booth on its way later this year, we may need to do some editing here before long.
The list below, which I’ve ranked in ascending order, is not exactly a ranking of the movies and shows themselves but more a ranking of what Abdul-Mateen brought to them and their significance in his career path. Read on to discover more and use the guide below to find them on AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
On any other kind of list, Jordan Peele’s Us would naturally place way higher. This was the director’s follow-up to Get Out, and even though it couldn’t match up to that earlier film’s airtight storytelling—nor the expansive, cosmic wonders of his later film, Nope—it’s still a wonderfully compelling and inventive horror movie.
The story explores the myth of the doppelganger through the framework of a mirrored world populated by a group called “The Tethered”, some of whom break out to cause some terror. Abdul-Mateen appears in the incredible opening sequence, playing the father of the girl who grows up to be the central protagonist, played memorably in a duel performance by Lupita N’yongo. This was one of Abdul-Mateen’s first performances, and while his screentime is limited, he makes every second count.
In 2018, the director Olivia Newman expanded her award-winning short, First Match, into a feature-length film starring Elvire Emanuelle and Coleman Domingo, but Abdul-Mateen again worked wonders with his supporting role.
First Match is the story of a teenage girl who believes that joining the boys' wrestling team might be her only chance of getting out of foster care and reuniting with her father. Domingo gives a typically warm performance as her wrestling coach, but it’s Abdul-Mateen’s portrayal of her wayward dad that locks you into the toughest emotional chokehold. If you’re a fan of Domingo’s performances in movies like Sing Sing and Euphoria, this one is particularly worth seeking out.
If you love sci-fi, don't miss Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in the episode of Black Mirror titled Striking Vipers. When people bemoan the more recent seasons of Black Mirror, it’s usually due to them being too sentimental. This episode from season five certainly isn’t beating those allegations, but Abdul-Mateen managed to stand out in it as the old friend turned virtual lover of Anthony Makie’s married protagonist.
As queer Black Mirror episodes go, Striking Vipers has nothing on Season 4’s San Junipero and is probably a little flippant regarding what it’s trying to say about polyamorous relationships and the like, but out of the ever-growing slate of episodes since moving to Netflix, it’s easily amongst the better ones.
If you’re a fan of Aaron Sorkin, you probably prefer it when the writer sticks to writing and lets someone else direct the movie. Those admirable moments of selflessness have given us modern classics like A Few Good Men, The Social Network and Steve Jobs. Its when he decides to put his director’s hat on that the results begin to vary.
Case in point was The Trial of the Chicago 7, a perfectly well-scripted and acted drama that was let down by Sorkin’s limitations as a stylist—but it can’t help but be a magnetic watch anyway. The story covers the titular proceedings: a historic occasion when seven luminaries of the 1970s counterculture were put on the stand—a setup that means we got to see Jeremy Strong play Jerry Rubin, Sascha Baron Cohen play Abbie Hoffman, and Abdul-Mateen play the Black Panthers founder Bobby Seale. Collectively, they won the SAG award for Best Ensemble.
If you’ve seen The Matrix Resurrections, you may understandably be inclined to think that some things are better off left dead. If you were able to forgive its inadequacies and view it as a $200 million meta trolling session against Warner Bros., however, you might have actually enjoyed it in some weird way.
Whatever the case, the movie—in which Abdul-Mateen took on the daunting task of playing Morpheus—in some ways confirmed his rise to Hollywood big leagues. If you appreciate all things Wachowski (especially the weirder ones like Speed Racer and Sense8), you owe it to them to check it out.
Long before the MCU came calling, Abdul-Mateen’s first brush with superhero cinema came in James Wan’s Aquaman—one of the only DCEU movies, it’s fair to say, that was warmly received by both regular moviegoers and fans.
Despite working alongside megawatt actors like Jason Momoa, Willem Dafoe and Nicole Kidman, Abdul-Mateen stood out as the evil pirate supervillain Black Manta, a larger-than-life role that allowed him to showcase his remarkable gravitas—in both this film and its sequel. If you’re a fan of the Zack Snyder era of DC (movies like Wonder Woman and Man of Steel), it’s well worth seeing.
When Michael Bay started churning out Transformers movies, it didn’t leave a whole lot of time for new ideas. Which is to say, when he decides to branch out now and then, it’s usually worth paying attention—movies like Pain & Gain and 13 Hours might not be to everyone’s tastes, but nobody else but Bay could have made them.
The same goes for Ambulance, a 2022 movie that felt like Speed on steroids—or was it the other way around? The plot follows two bank robbers (Abdul-Mateen and Jake Gyllenhaal) who end up using an ambulance as their getaway car, only to discover that there’s a person on the brink of death in the back. And yes, it’s batshit crazy.
Nia Da Costa recently made her return to horror with the excellent 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, but this 2021 remake of the 1992 slasher movie Candyman is well worth going back and catching up on.
Da Costa is proving herself to be a versatile filmmaker thanks to movies like Hedda (the less said about The Marvels, the better), but you sense she’s in her element when there’s blood to be spilt and knives to be sharpened. For the title role (Abdul-Mateen’s first big leading part), the actor worked wonders in reimagining the character (memorably played by the great Tony Todd in the original) for a new audience.
If you like the energy, endearing vibe and deadpan humour that Andrew Guest helped bring to Halkeye, you’re gonna love Wonder Man—a series that just recently bucked the trend of underdeveloped Marvel Studios TV shows.
Starring Abdul-Mateen as Simon Williams, a talented but struggling actor who learns that he has superpowers, the show is a bit like imagining what would happen if Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 and The Studio had a baby. An Emmy nomination for Ben Kingsley (who reprises his role as Trevor Slattery) would not be surprising or displeasing.
For all of that, Abdul-Mateen’s best performance to date is still his portrayal of Cal Aber in Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen, a phenomenally creative reimagining of Alan Moore’s graphic novel/sacred text. Set 34 years after the events of the comics (with the great Jean Smart playing an older and crankier Silk Spectre and Jeremy Irons as a crumbling Ozymandius), the show brought the spirit of Moore’s story crashing into the present day. In short, it was an absolute triumph
Abdul-Mateen was no small part of that: the reveal (spoilers) that his character was Dr Manhattan came in Episode 7, but it was the following instalment—a flashback that filled in the gaps—that has rightfully gone down as one of the best episodes of TV ever. If you haven’t seen it yet, I’m jealous that you get to watch it for the first time.
