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Jovan Adepo Is In Your Next Favorite HBO Show

Jovan Adepo Is In Your Next Favorite HBO Show
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MICAIAH CARTER

Jacket and shirt by Kenzo. Rings, Adepo’s own.

There’s a reason Jovan Adepo doesn’t mind a little discomfort nowadays. Back in the late aughts, the now-thirty-six-year-old actor not-so-secretly harbored dreams of making it to the NFL. Adepo made the roster at Bowie State University in Maryland as a running back, but he hardly saw the football field. “I was good enough to make the team, not good enough to get significant playing time,” he tells me. “My junior year, I’m like, Shit, I need to do something.”

Adepo had the drive—but where could he go? The arts, it turned out. “Telling stories came natural to me,” he says. “I enjoyed exploring different realities in my head.”

a person poses with a colorful jacket against a yellow wall

Fifteen years later, Adepo’s resiliency has taken him from Bowie State to Budapest, where he’s shooting season 2 of the brainy Netflix sci-fi series 3 Body Problem. After telling me about life in Hungary—he’s not yet acclimated to the weather and hasn’t had a chance to explore much beyond the hotel and the set—we discuss the project that may soon launch him to a higher plane of stardom: IT: Welcome to Derry. The prequel series to Stephen King’s seminal 1986 novel, streaming on HBO Max this fall, will star Adepo as a father whose Black family moves into a white neighborhood in 1960s Maine. They’re not welcome.

“They’re having to deal with multiple realities of evil,” he says of what his character’s family endures, before explaining what drew him to work with Andy Muschietti, director of the Bill Skarsgård–led IT films. “Artists that feel comfortable exploring the ugly, the uncomfortable—those are the artists I want to collaborate with.”

The soft-spoken Adepo recalls his brush with another boundary-pusher in the EGOT-anointed actress Viola Davis, whom he met through a mutual connection in church. She advised Adepo—who had pivoted to creative writing and journalism classes after he put down his football helmet—to study plays. Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog became a favorite, as did August Wilson’s Fences. “Read all types of stories,” Davis told Adepo at the time. “As much Shakespeare as you’re able to digest.”

Get to know Adepo and it’s easy to see why Davis shared her wisdom with an unknown grad. The actor’s curiosity and intellect bursts through the seams—when you speak, his attention fixes on you like a laser. He took Davis’s words to heart. Adepo soon tried his hand at acting—and he thrived. He went on to portray the son of Davis and Denzel Washington in Fences, played jazz trumpet in Babylon, and in Watchmen he wore the mask of Hooded Justice. Now Adepo plays a physicist at a crossroads on 3 Body Problem—and he even earned a coveted role in Christopher Nolan’s next epic, The Odyssey.

Adepo doesn’t play favorites with his roles, but taking on the character of Sidney in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon made a lasting impression on the actor. Set in the final days of the silent-film era, Chazelle’s story explores how the art of cinema yielded to a then-radical technological revolution: sound. Among the many Hollywood dreamers whose lives change forever is Sidney, a Black jazz artist. Because he has a lighter complexion than his bandmates, Sidney is forced to don blackface to appease racist audiences, who will not see a picture with an “integrated” band. The scene is full of close-ups on Adepo’s face that scan a thousand emotions—shock, confusion, rage, resentment.

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MICAIAH CARTER

Jacket and shirt by Bode. Ring, Adepo’s own.

It’s an uncomfortable moment to watch onscreen, and filming it was stressful as well. The optics of a white director like Chazelle instructing his Black star to cake on shoe polish—to the confusion of the band ensemble, who weren’t fully aware of the storyline beforehand—meant that art eerily mirrored reality. “I’m a huge fan of Damien [Chazelle],” Adepo says. “I appreciated his patience and candor. He understood that it wasn’t him that’s doing this, what I consider a very embarrassing act onscreen. But I thought it was necessary, and it would be handled with sincerity and care.”

Adepo was challenged again on the set of the 2023 drama His Three Daughters, directed by Azazel Jacobs. A scene featuring Adepo’s Benjy as he verbally spars with Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen’s characters just wasn’t sticking with the actor. “For whatever reason, I just could not [do it],” Adepo says, adding it was “a me thing” and not on the script nor Jacobs’s direction. “Because I knew who I was with, these powerhouses—the fear of being a weak link had gotten to my head. Which is not useful, because you just want to be present. I wasn’t present.”

I ask how he defused the situation. For a moment, he sounds like he’s back at Bowie State, breaking down the game from the sidelines: No magic tricks, no secret formulas. He just gritted his teeth and did the work. “You find a way to overcome it. You get your rhythm,” he says.

Such is the life of a perfectionist like Adepo, who admits he can sometimes get in his own way. “Doing that can cripple your growth and freedom as an artist. That was a time I was incredibly afraid. Like, Shit, I hope I'm not letting my teammates [down].” Judging by the final product, he did not let his teammates down. “Your castmates are there to support you. That’s just part of the work, man.”

Adepo is now shooting season 2 of 3 Body Problem, and while he won’t get into the season in detail, he hints that the events of season 1—like the violent death of a one-night stand right before him, in broad daylight—will influence his character arc tremendously. “I can safely say that all of the experiences we accumulate in our lives, they affect the decisions we make in the future,” he says.

Adepo and I eventually get to talking about fear. The career of an actor is no less precarious than that of a professional athlete, after all. Of all the times he’s wrestled with crippling doubt, what has been his greatest weapon? “My desire to succeed outweighs fear,” he says. “I’ve been validated by peers, so I know I’m good. But you want to push the envelope. My desire to do that and my search for a challenge exceeds my fear of somebody not liking a performance or not casting me in something.”

Lest you think Adepo dwells only in darkness, he says he wants to make a children’s adventure movie someday. “An animated film about kids with overactive imaginations,” he says. Whether Adepo sees that dream through depends on where he goes from here. But he’s shown he can go the distance. Just give him the ball and watch him run.

Story by Eric FranciscoPhotographed by Micaiah CarterStyled by Chloe HartsteinGrooming by Jenny Sauce using Orveda Skincare and OribeSet Design by Michael SturgeonTailoring by Yana GalbshteinVisual Director: James MorrisEntertainment Director: Andrea CuttlerVideo Director: Amanda KabbabeVideo Senior Producer: Brian Murray-RealDirector of Photography: Alvah HolmesAssociate Cinematographer: Jay AguirreVideo Producer: Ali Buchalter

Video Editor: Jeff Sharkey

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