Aaron Pierre is frozen. He’s leaning forward in his seat, arms suspended in front of him, his eyes fixed on nothing in particular on the other side of the hotel restaurant. A few seconds pass. Cutlery and glasses clink gently in the background. Still, nothing. Pierre remains perfectly still, as though someone has just hit pause on reality. Eventually, he checks back in. He slumps back against the banquette and scratches his head.
“How’s life at the moment?” wasn’t supposed to be a difficult question—friendly chitchat, if anything, a soft launch for bigger conversations about him joining two culturally dominant franchises, DC and Star Wars, in the same year—but Pierre is taking it seriously. He’s already graciously deployed the typical answer for famous actors: “I’m literally living my dream.” Now, he wants to explain how it’s changed him. “I’m trying to think of a healthy word to describe it,” he says. Finally, he lands on the right phrase. “It’s like an insatiable curiosity.”
Pierre seems satisfied, firming up his answer with a sage nod. What exactly does he mean by “healthy”? It kind of suggests that there’s a more complicated answer on the tip of his tongue. “No,” he insists. “It’s more that I really believe in the power of words, which is why I tend to speak at about one mile per hour.” True. Pierre has a lot to say, but it often arrives as wise, philosophical abstractions instead of gushing confessions.
Maybe “insatiable curiosity” is simply a sunnier way to describe obsession. At the tail end of May, Pierre completed an eight-week run of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at London’s Old Vic. Two weeks after his final bow, as he got ready for our interview, he was still running one of his monologues. “I was finding different intonations with it, finding emphasis on different words,” he says. “That’s one of the most beautiful things about theater: living with the exact same words and having the privilege of a constant excavation of those words. I discover every time that you can never get to the bottom.”
The 32-year-old from Croydon looks the part of the thinking man’s action hero, too: sunglasses, black jeans, a Bob Marley tee with the sleeves hacked off, revealing the Herculean biceps that tackled crooked cops to the ground in 2024’s action thriller and global Netflix number one Rebel Ridge. He’s also winningly charming: when our waiter explains the protein-packed benefits of a smoked haddock omelette, Pierre somehow avoids sounding smug as he laughs and says, “What makes you say that?” (A breakfast burrito ultimately proves more tempting.) He’s voiced the king of Pride Rock in Mufasa: The Lion King, played Malcom X in the Disney+ series Genius and, most recently, got caught in a love triangle between Greta Lee and Marion Cotillard on The Morning Show. In a matter of weeks, he’ll enter the world of superherodom in the HBO series Lanterns—a gritty, prestige-TV take on the iconic Green Lantern comic series.
