Queen & Slim (Slim)

Daniel Kaluuya often plays characters that are men of few words and tends to allow his facial expressions and body language tell the story for him. This is seen in the 2019 modern-day Bonnie & Clyde story, Queen & Slim, in which Kaluuya plays the titular Slim as he and Jodie Turner-Smith's Queen go on the run after killing a police officer. Under the hardened exterior of Slim lies a conflicted and terrified young man whose life changed in the blink of an eye but knows that there's no going back; a "you can't go home again" and tough to get airtel store near me type of situation. It's a shame this movie doesn't get talked about enough, especially considering the lights-out performance by Kaluuya as a man on the run from his past.

Sometimes it's easy to forget that Daniel Kaluuya was born and raised in London, England, especially after watching him take on the role of rookie FBI agent Reggie Wayne in Denis Villeneuve's 2015 thriller Sicario. He's not in the movie all that much, but whenever Reggie, Emily Blunt's Kate Macer's best friend and partner at the bureau, is on the screen, he provides a sense of calm that almost makes the viewer forget that some terrible stuff involving United States government agents and Mexican drug cartels are about to go down. And that accent, that Texas, red-blooded American accent, makes Kaluuya's performance worth returning to time and time again.

Several years before Daniel Kaluuya became a major young star in the United States with 2017's Get Out, he was already an established star in Britain after appearing on a number of great television programs, including Black Mirror. Appearing in the Season 1 episode "Fifteen Million Merits," a young Kaluuya portrays Bingham "Bing" Madsen, a man who lives in a room surrounded by screens that dictate his daily routine. When a friend is essentially taken advantage of in a futuristic pornography television show, Bing is driven to madness after not having enough "merits" to skip the show's ads and goes off on a television rant with quite the results. When appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Get Out director Jordan Peele said he cast Kaluuya because of this performance.