Emory Cohen

Cohen's film debut came in 2008 with *Afterschool*, Antonio Campos's slow-burn drama that premiered at Cannes. It's a tough watch — deliberately paced, deliberately cold — and it's not the kind of movie that launches careers overnight. But it put Cohen in front of the right people. A few years later, NBC's *Smash* (2012) gave him a TV foothold as Leo, a recurring character in the backstage musical drama, and that same year *The Place Beyond the Pines* arrived and changed the conversation around him. Playing AJ Cross, the son of Ryan Gosling's outlaw character, Cohen carried the film's entire third act — a structural gamble by Cianfrance that only works if the audience buys the new lead. They did. The mid-2010s were busy. *Beneath the Harvest Sky* (2013), *The Gambler* (2014), *Stealing Cars* (2015) — a string of films that don't always get mentioned together but show a working actor who wasn't waiting around between big swings. *Brooklyn* (2015) was the big swing that landed. His Tony Fiorello is genuinely funny in places, which is easy to underestimate — the scene where he fumbles through dinner with Eilis's family is the kind of moment that could've been broad and instead feels real. Critics noticed. The film earned multiple Academy Award nominations, and Cohen's performance was widely cited as a key reason the romance worked at all. He spent the back half of the decade on *The OA*, Netflix's strange, divisive, and — to its devoted fans — irreplaceable series. Cohen played Homer across both seasons (2016–2019), a character whose arc involves trauma, interdimensional travel, and a set of interpretive movements that the show's writers called "the movements." Hard to say if the show's cancellation after Season 2 cut short something that could've been defining for him, but it built a loyal audience that still talks about it. His 2025 film *Marty Supreme*, in which he plays Ira Mizler, marks his most recent screen credit, continuing a filmography that's stayed consistently off the beaten path.