When Ethan Herisse was in college, his friends kept a running joke that he was a real-life Hannah Montana. He spent his middle and high school years in Burbank going to auditions between classes, acting first in guest roles on shows like The Mindy Project and then getting the gig of a lifetime as the teenage Yusef Salaam in When They See Us. When Herisse matriculated at UC Irvine, he kept that part of his life a secret as long as possible. “I’m not leading with, ‘I’m an actor,’ ” he says with a laugh. “But it was funny because I would meet people, and it would be completely normal, and then would come the time to exchange Instagrams and they’d look me up and be like — ‘What?’ ”
Herisse graduated in June with a B.S. in chemistry, and this December he celebrates the release of his first starring role. The actor, now 24, leads the adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys — a meditation on racism, trauma and memory, using the story of two teenagers who bond while at a violent reform school in the Jim Crow South. Brandon Wilson (The Way Back) was already cast as Turner, a relative veteran of the fictional but historically inspired Nickel Academy, when Herisse came in to read for the part of the comparatively more wide-eyed Elwood. The two bonded instantly, and when they arrived at the New Orleans set, a COVID production delay gave them more time to get acquainted. They spent a week watching films like Tár and Bones and All and exchanging music by James Blake and Omar Apollo, building a bond that helped them endure the project’s unsettling material.
“I had no problem walking into this really vulnerable space because I wasn’t just with a co-worker, I was with a friend,” Herisse says. “And then at the end of the day, we were able to lean on each other to get back into our bodies. It helped me get back to being Ethan.”
Nickel Boys isn’t Herisse’s first time shepherding a heavy story to the screen — he says that during the making of When They See Us, he often felt the weight of telling the story of the Exonerated Five in a manner that felt visceral — but Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross’ style of filmmaking brought unexpected challenges. Ross, an Oscar-nominated documentarian, shot the film almost entirely in POV format, so that the audience sees only what each main character sees. It required the actors to look directly into the lens (a faux pas in any other shoot) while they were on camera; the actor who wasn’t being filmed would follow the DP at close range in an attempt to re-create what normal dialogue feels like. “It required an unlearning of everything I knew about acting, and the learning of a new language,” says Herisse. “But I’m really grateful for it. It was really special to be able to give a lot to the other actor even when you’re not in a scene. And it made the movie as authentic as possible.”
Herisse in Nickel Boys, whose first-person perspective allows viewers to experience what the main characters see.
Courtesy of Orion Pictures
The result is a film that asks a lot of its audience. As the Dec. 20 release date — and awards season — approaches, Nickel Boys‘ experimental style, and the potential challenges its visual language presents, will become even more of a talking point. (The New York Times‘ Alissa Wilkinson, in choosing her top films of 2024, said plainly, “I’m amazed this movie exists.”) Herisse has sat in on a few screenings of the film, first during its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival and then a month later at the New York Film Festival, and says he’s been stunned not only by the size of the crowds but also by the way folks are allowing themselves to experience the project. “I had two hopes for this movie coming out — that you could feel how much love we put into making it, and that people liked it. That’s been the case so far, so I’ve already gotten everything out of this that I wanted.”
Awards pundits are circling too. Ross recently won the Gotham Award for best director, and the film is a best drama nominee at the 2025 Golden Globes. But Herisse says his parents are his most important viewers. He’s still grappling with the sacrifices they made in support of his creative pursuits — including moving the family from Massachusetts so that he could go to auditions without completely disrupting his school routine — and the ways that he can (spiritually) repay them. He brought them along to his first viewing of Nickel Boys, sitting in a private screening room with co-star Hamish Linklater and his daughter. “We were all pretty distraught afterwards, and the first thing my mom said to me was, ‘You need to do a comedy next,’ ” he recalls with a laugh, adding that he’s taking her advice to heart and would love to one day be part of a movie like Bottoms, citing it as one of his favorite theatergoing experiences. “And her next words were, ‘Are you crying?’ Because, well, I was crying.”
This story appeared in the Dec. 13 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Source: Hollywoodreporter
