Jonathan Majors Is Back. Yikes.

I believed in Jonathan Majors. 

My introduction to the actor was The Last Black Man in San Francisco—a 2019 A24 film that explored gentrification, racial identity, and vulnerability. Majors’s widely lauded performance was perhaps best described by Rolling Stone as “both deeply sensitive and charmingly left-of-center.” President Barack Obama even placed the film on his annual list of favorite media in 2019. 

That led to a genuine breakout. From HBO’s Lovecraft Country to Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods to Michael B. Jordan’s Creed III, Majors was on screens all  across America, and quickly became the poster child for a kind of new Black masculinity. Major’s acting—and his carefully cultivated public image—seemed to call upon both the Black leading men of the past, particularly legends like Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington, and the present. Here was a Black star for a new, post-Ferguson America. Here was the next great Black actor. The summer of 2020 only reaffirmed that, as he was announced as the next central villain of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I wasn’t alone—many people believed in Majors back then. 

Majors’s run came to an abrupt halt in March 2023,  when he was arrested on charges of assault, strangulation, and harassment against his girlfriend at the time, the actress Grace Jabbari. He was ultimately convicted on two misdemeanor charges of assault and harassment and was mandated to attend a year of domestic violence counseling. Majors denied putting hands on Jabbari, and still does. 

He was abruptly canceled—dropped from an ad with the U.S. Army, dropped by his agent, uninvited by the Met Gala, and most notably, cut from Marvel Studios. There were some strange, awkward attempts at a rebrand—and some did buy it—but it was nowhere near enough to return him to his ascendant status. Now Majors is trying a comeback—with an assist from conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, whose Daily Wire media company cast him in Run, Hide, Fight: Infidel, a clumsy work of right-wing agitprop in which terrorists infiltrate a college pro-Palestine protest and quickly starting massacring students. 

White actors who get canceled and pop up at Mar-a-Lago or the RNC—think Rob Schneider, Rosanne Barr—often do so without much fanfare or discomfort because the cultural space they occupied before their cancellations was politically neutral at best. But this path hasn’t necessarily been open to Black canceled celebrities in the same way. The most famous brothers and sisters who have turned to Trump—like Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne—have done so during career nadirs in which they had already been struggling to maintain any semblance of relevance they used to have. 

Majors, whose fall from grace came at the peak of his career, is a new phenomenon. His previous cultural status, which heavily involved liberal identity politics, makes him particularly interesting in this regard. He spent his career enthusiastically pushing back on stereotypes surrounding Black masculinity, fully accepting the burden of representation placed upon him before he made his rightward pivot. Who better than the embodiment of soft Black masculinity to serve as the face of a low-budget work of conservative fantasy?  

Majors is tall, strong-featured, and dark-skinned, but before his fall from grace he frequently depicted odd, eccentric, and sensitive characters—a combination that made many commentators and fans, myself included, see him as a cultural silver bullet against tired tropes surrounding static representations of Black men. This was most evident in his 2023 Ebony magazine cover story—perhaps the peak of his positive social capital. Majors appeared shirtless, lips pursed, draped over a lounge chair, holding two bouquets of roses, and surrounded by the petals. The headline read “Jonathan Majors: Hollywood’s Most Wanted.” The shoot immediately sparked homophobic backlash from parts of the online Black community, which further cemented Majors’s status. 

“I knew that this was the response we would get,” Ebony editor in chief Marielle Bobo said at the time. “This was intentional, as the entire goal with the creative was to challenge stereotypes around Black masculinity.”

This past persona is what made his return to the silver screen in Run, Hide, Fight: Infidel so jarring: The film demands that he suppress the range, sensitivity, and eccentricity that made him so compelling in the first place.    

Run, Hide, Fight: Infidel is a two-hour-long production that serves to stoke the average right-wing reactionary’s deepest, darkest fantasies. The radical Islamic terrorists who infiltrate a generic public university in Virginia make female students wear burqas, hang a trans student with the transgender flag, and slit the throat of the encampment leader because she doesn’t want to have babies with them. The group massacres hundreds of students, as dead bodies cover the campus quad by the end of the movie.

Majors plays Clay Saunders, a former Delta Force Agent turned public speaker who rails against the existential threat of Islam. “There are three ways Islam will conquer the West. Through immigration, through the wombs of our women, and by using our own Western freedoms against us,” Saunders says onstage at the school. “What makes them so dangerous is that their goals are not in this life, but the next.… Islam is not consistent with the fundamentals of Western values.” 

His speech is then interrupted by terrorists who gained access to campus with the help of pro-Gaza encampment protests, who are then brutally murdered themselves by the terrorists for offenses like being gay, having blue hair, or speaking freely. The massacre continues until the film’s protagonist—the son of Saunders’s slain comrade back in the Delta Force—saves the day. Even if you are able to set aside the premise, the writing is piss-poor and rife with painfully antiquated clichés: An Asian student automatically knows how to defuse a bomb; an overweight Black security guard makes racially disparaging comic relief jokes (“I’m still looking for mine!” he says, when a lost child asks him for help finding her father); everyone portrayed in it is a diluted caricature of how the right wing sees them. And it somehow goes on for two hours. 

In Saunders, Majors has gone from endlessly dynamic to completely static. In Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, Majors plays David, a progressive Morehouse graduate who accompanies his Trump-supporting Vietnam veteran father on a soul-searching trip back to the jungle where his closest friend (played by Chadwick Boseman) died fighting for a country that hated him. In The Harder They Fall, he plays the vengeance-driven Nat Love in a performance that stands head and shoulders above a cast full of Black Hollywood royalty. In Magazine Dreams, the last film he made before his cancellation, Majors portrays an autistic man with body dysmorphia who goes on to become a successful bodybuilder—at a massive cost. In these roles, Majors plays Black men who contain just as many multitudes as anyone else. Now, with Infidels, he’s nestling in to perhaps the most shameful stereotype of all: the “good” Negro. Clay Saunders is one-dimensional, gruff, robotic, violent, unchanging—all themes that have harangued Black men since their earliest depictions in American media.  

While it was initially strange to hear of Majors’s choice to work with Shapiro’s company and conservative director Kyle Rankin, it seems like his cancellation has truly stuck, preventing him from reentering the mainstream. 

“I think when that happens to an actor, most of Hollywood would be fine if they kind of go stand in the corner and stare at the wall for the rest of their life,” Rankin told me. “And I just think that it is a tragedy.… The left seems to love people that have served some time. And when they get out of prison, we can celebrate them, but we can’t celebrate someone who may have made a mistake.” 

“When you do any movie, there’s a list of the four older—a little too old— white guys who you’ve seen in every goddamn direct-to-DVD,” Rankin said. “And then when [producer Dallas Sonnier] came into my office one day and was like, ‘Jonathan Majors,’ I’m like, ‘Is there even a chance? He’s an incredible actor.’ And he’s like, ‘Yes, because he’s been canceled, and he would still like to work.’” 

Majors worked so hard that he broke a picket line, continuing to work after IATSE, a union that represents entertainment workers, called for a strike during production, citing several safety issues on set, including props falling on people. Majors and co-star JC Kilcoyne even fell six feet through a sheet of untempered glass at one point. Kilcoyne required stitches. Majors didn’t seem to care, and can be heard saying, “Use it!” to Rankin in the footage after the accident. Rankin dismissed the claims of an unsafe set, and claimed that Majors and Kilcoyne only fell “three feet off the ground, or two and a half feet, or something.” Asked about the strike, Rankin blamed it on a “gal in the makeup department.” 

“She just started to be like, ‘You know what? I would like to flip this movie.’ I want health care or whatever it be. So she just started expounding that view to everyone and everyone who was listening, I knew none of this,” he continued. “I think the production was actually running quite well.” And while Rankin told me he and Majors never “talked politics,” Majors has given every indication that he was 100 percent committed to this comically bigoted, incredible bloated, career suicide of a film. 

“He took his job of being number one on the call sheet very seriously,” Rankin continued. “He was lovely to the young cast, took them out for coffee. Would work out with them. He was always giving them advice if they sought it, and it was really lovely to watch.”

Infidels was genuinely hard to watch. There are certainly campy, absurd moments of humor that break through the fever dream (many of which were clipped and went viral almost immediately after the film’s release). The most widely circulated one features the Muslim antagonist kicking a pro-Palestinian student off of a roof for being gay (something the right often imagines Hamas doing to LGBT people who are pro-Palestine).

But sitting with the context of what Majors’s career might have been makes it sad more than anything. Majors was one of the best young actors I’d ever seen on-screen, and now he’s been reduced to starring in cheaper, modern versions of Cold War and Iraq War propaganda—and on his own volition. This may very well be what he is for the rest of his career: shilling for right-wingers eager to exploit what still lingers from his previous status as a liberal darling. 

It’s a strange feeling when an artist you admire becomes someone unrecognizable. Former Kanye West fans get it. Former Nicki Minaj fans do too. Majors’s about-face stings so much because he made us feel like he was ours—a Black man for the modern age who refused to be boxed in and understood the significance of that action. And he communicated that in every photo shoot, every interview, every careful, heartstring-tugging performance. It’s not an exaggeration. He was well on his way to being a Poitier and Denzel for my generation. I’ve never been more moved by any young Black actors. There are so many roles he’ll never get, performances we’ll never see, moments we’ll never feel. His career is relegated to racist, straight-to-digital drivel that he was a willing participant in. And it may be the only way he ever works consistently again. 

There was one question that really jumped out at me while looking back on Majors’s 2023 soft Black masculinity run.

“What’s a question every man should ask himself?” asked Ebony’s Cori Murray. It’s the final question of the interview.

“Was it worth it?” Majors replies. “It highlights a certain amount of cognitive dissonance where you have to reflect. I don’t think men reflect enough.”

“I think if you ask yourself if it’s worth it before you act, you’ll be on the path, you’ll be on the proper righteous path. ‘Was it worth it?’ also speaks to the man you want to be—because that’s the meter you’re checking it against.” 

I wonder if he thinks Infidels was worth it.