Sterling K. Brown on Playing the Villain in ‘Is God Is’: ‘I Love Seeing Black Women Win’

Sterling K. Brown has played a father who would do anything for his family. He has played a man of faith holding his community together. He has played a flamboyant preacher crumbling in real time. He has played heroes, leaders, and men trying to become better versions of themselves under impossible pressure.

What he has never played is the monster. That changes with Is God Is.

The film, written, produced, and directed by Aleshea Harris and now in theaters, is an adaptation of her acclaimed 2018 stage play. It follows twin sisters Racine and Anaia, played by Kara Young and Mallori Johnson, who carry burn scars from a fire set by their father when they were children.

When their mother, disfigured and bedridden, sends them on a mission to find their father and kill him, the two women set out across the American South carrying a rage that the film treats not as pathology but as righteous fury. Brown plays the father. He is credited only as Man.

The choice of that name is deliberate. Man is not a person in the traditional narrative sense. He is a symbol, a force, a representation of what unchecked male violence does to families and communities over generations.

Harris described him in the script as approaching a scene the way Obama might approach a suburban dinner party, soft-spoken, unassuming, wearing khakis. That is the horror of him. The damage is extraordinary. The presentation is ordinary. And Brown, who has spent most of his career being the most likable man in any room, nails it.

Brown spoke exclusively with Rolling Out about his decision to take the role, and his answer is worth quoting in full because it says something important about the kind of actor he is and the kind of stories he believes the industry needs to make.

“So there’s the macro and the micro,” Brown began. “I love Black women, and I love seeing Black women win. I thought this was an incredibly creative script, something different and new. And I think that we, as a community, have been asking for creative and new stories. The more diverse the landscape of stories we get to tell, the more people will stop putting us into a box in terms of what a Black movie is, what a Black story is. We are everything, and so the opportunity to do everything is something that excites me.”

He also specifically cited director Aleshea Harris’s creative pedigree and what the film gives Black women on screen that they rarely get.

“Aleshea wrote a play, then she adapted the play, and she directed the play, and I think she did so brilliantly,” he said. “I also love the idea that Black women get a chance to be messy in this film, like hella messy. I feel like oftentimes we’re asked, in many stories, to be voices of reason, sort of the sensible side component of a larger story, and that’s not the case in this. That is exciting to me.”

Brown also had his reasons on a personal level. “On a micro level, I feel like people will put you in a box from time to time and think, ‘All right, this is what Sterling does,’ and I’m always interested in doing anything that is outside of people’s expectations. I love to surprise people as much as possible.” And then, with the kind of clarity that cuts through any ambiguity about where he stands morally on the material: “Somebody has to drive the bus in the Rosa Parks story. So even though you’re the big bad, I still believe in the level of agency that Black women get a chance to take in determining their own futures. Even though you have to be the antagonist in that, I believe in the bigger story.”

The critical response to Brown’s performance has been nearly unanimous, but this is something new. It’s one of his strongest performances, even though he has limited screen time. The choice to keep Man largely obscured for most of the film, seen in tight close-ups, in flashbacks, always partially hidden, means that when he finally appears in full, the anticipation the film has built around him is almost unbearable.

Brown plays the character as menacingly soft-spoken, a man whose voice shifts between a pillar of the community and the violence of a predator without ever raising his voice.

The film is in theaters now. It also stars Janelle Monáe, Vivica A. Fox, and Erika Alexander. It is Aleshea Harris’s feature directorial debut. And it is exactly the kind of film Sterling K. Brown said the industry needs more of: creative, new, Black, and unapologetically centered on Black women’s agency.

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