The Nickel Boys breakout star is finding light in the darkest stories.
Acting wasn’t the first career choice for Ethan Herisse, the 24-year-old star of powerful historical drama Nickel Boys. In fact, when he was growing up in Massachusetts, he imagined a future on a court shooting hoops. “I was going to be a basketball player,” he recalls, but there was one problem. “I was not good.” When his younger sister, then participating in pageants, was approached to take part in acting workshops, Herisse tagged along and quickly discovered his real passion.
At age 11, his parents asked him if he wanted to pursue acting seriously. The answer was a no-brainer. “For them to hear that from an 11-year-old, and have enough faith in me that young to completely uproot their lives because I said that that was my dream...” he trails off in disbelief. His family moved to Los Angeles, where Herisse picked up small parts before he landed the role of Yusef Salaam, a real-life member of the Central Park Five, whose wrongful conviction and imprisonment in 1990 became the focus of Ava DuVernay’s challenging miniseries, When They See Us. He had just graduated high school, he remembers: “I was thrust into this space where I was working with this phenomenal director in Ava and all of these other incredible actors and actresses.”
When They See Us was Herisse’s first time working on a project of such ambitious scale, but his devastating turn in Nickel Boys sees him level up, with the film receiving major awards buzz. The actor plays Elwood, a bright teenage boy sent to a reform school for a crime he didn’t commit in Jim Crow’s America. Despite the atrocities that Elwood endures, he finds a friend and confidant in Turner (Brandon Wilson), whose pragmatism counters Elwood’s optimism. “When I first read the script, I admired how intelligent and kind he was, and how socially and politically active he was for his age,” says Herisse of his character. “Then I fell in love with his relationship with Turner, and how that was the light that you can find throughout the story.”
Uniquely, Nickel Boys was almost entirely filmed with first-person point- of-view shots, and while most of Herisse’s performance happens off- camera, the actor explains that he approached every scene as if the film was made traditionally: “Any time you hear my voice, I was there next to whoever was operating the camera.”
Like Elwood and Turner, Herisse and Wilson became close friends. “We spent as much time off set as we did on set,” Herisse says, noting that a lot of their downtime was spent at the restaurant chain Waffle House. “We ended up starting this thing called ‘Waffle House Mondays’ and we would invite producers, crew and cast.” Even their director, RaMell Ross, eventually joined in on the tradition. “By the time we were leaving, though, my body was sick,” Herisse adds, laughing. “I’ve been on a long hiatus.”
Since the film’s premiere at Telluride in August, Herisse has been on the festival circuit rubbing shoulders with filmmakers he’d love to work with: his dream list includes Barry Jenkins, Waves director Trey Edward Shults and Denis Villeneuve. “His movies are so grand,” he says in praise of the Dune filmmaker. Should he ever need it, Herisse has a secret weapon to lean on: a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry. He says his parents encouraged him to “experience life as much as you can”, including school, which brought him to the University of California, Irvine, where he discovered that, unlike basketball, he was good at chemistry.
And he enjoyed it, too. “If I’ve got to do some organic synthesis one day for a stint in my life, I guess I’d be okay,” he jokes. Judging by the success of Nickel Boys, however, hopefully Herisse can leave the lab behind and look to a synthesis-less future.
The Show: The Penguin
“I just caught up on Industry, I’m rewatching Succession, and I’m watching The Penguin right now. All of the HBO stuff.”
The Book: Stories Of Your Life by Ted Chiang
“The last book that I read was actually the collection of short stories that Arrival is based on. [They’re] really cool.”
The Album: Charm by Clairo
“Charm has been on repeat. One more that I’ve been listening to a good amount is the new JPEGMAFIA album [I Lay Down My Life For You].
This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Empire. Photography by Domizia Salusest, shot exclusively for Empire at the Rosewood Hotel in London.