20 Underused Actors We Hope to See Break Out in 2017

Adepero Oduye in Pariah (2011), image courtesy of Focus Features

13. Adepero Oduye

Why you should know her: Pariah, the directorial debut of Dee Rees, is a quietly radical piece of art house filmmaking. To start with, the 17-year-old protagonist, Alike, is lesbian and a person of color – still, sadly, a rarity in American cinema and even television. Also, more impressively, the movie manages to navigate the complex politics of race, gender, sexuality, and class without resorting to trite moralizing or wallowing in misery. In many ways, it feels like a forerunner to Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight: an intimate, sumptuously lit portrait of queerness that isn’t afraid of a little hope.

Oduye is the key. So much of the movie depends on her being able to express the unspeakable – ideas and feelings that her character struggles to understand, let alone describe. And she succeeds with grace and infectious brio. Like Alike, Oduye cycles through various personas, donning and shedding layers of self like clothes. In one scene, she might be reticent and inscrutable, blending effortlessly into the background, and in the next, she’ll seem utterly carefree, filling the room with her youthful joy. All the while, she never loses track of the simple desires and anxieties that drive Alike, mooring her to herself.

Since Pariah, Oduye has had a couple of minor roles in major movies, namely 12 Years a Slave, where she played the unapologetically emotional Eliza, and The Big Short, where she played the icy Morgan Stanley executive Kathy Tao. Although she makes an impression in both, it’s hard to not feel like her talent is going to waste.

Upcoming projects: The “supporting role in large casts” trend will continue with The Dinner, a thriller directed by Oren Moverman, and Geostorm, an action flick starring Gerard Butler (seriously?).