Nowadays, it’s difficult to find a fresh movie star, which is why Jonathan Majors was highly regarded in Hollywood. The 34-year-old actor, cerebral and personable with the muscular frame of an action hero, rose fast from critically praised independent films to major motion pictures. With the huge success of “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “Creed III,” along with the prestige drama “Magazine Dreams,” which was a candidate for the Oscar, this was expected to be the year that made him an A-list star.
Majors, on the other hand, has spectacularly failed. Majors, who was accused of assaulting his then-girlfriend Grace Jabbari in March, was found guilty on Monday of reckless assault and harassment; his sentence is set for February 6. (He was found not guilty on two other charges pertaining to intentional behavior.)
Marvel Studios said shortly after the decision was read that it will not be pursuing any more projects with the actor. The actor was cast as the supervillain Kang and was scheduled to return in that role in many of the studio’s productions, including the next two massively expensive “Avengers” films. It’s another evidence that this once-promising Hollywood star is become a non-entity. “Magazine Dreams,” in which Majors portrayed a bodybuilder under the influence of steroids, had already been taken off Searchlight Pictures’ year-end release schedule, despite the fact that many people who saw the gripping drama at its January Sundance Film Festival premiere had anticipated that it would net Majors his first Oscar nomination.
It’s difficult to remember an ascension and collapse as quick as Majors’, since few performers had been as certain of superstardom as she was. Majors played a sensitive writer who struggles to create art in his increasingly gentrified city in the critically praised 2019 film “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” which he landed shortly after graduating from Yale School of Drama. Majors soared to the top of casting directors’ want lists after being dubbed a “mournful heartbreaker” by Times critic Manohla Dargis in her review of the movie. Here was a fresh new character actor with lots of leading-man potential who could make quirky and interesting decisions.
The next year, Majors took on more prominent roles. He was nominated for an Emmy for his performance in the HBO supernatural thriller “Lovecraft Country,” and he made appearances in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” ensemble. The actor joined Marvel Studios in October 2020 to play the role of Kang, a multiversal threat whose numerous incarnations would torture the protagonists of “Ant-Man” and the Disney+ series “Loki” before engaging in combat with all other superheroes in two upcoming big-screen films, “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty” (2026) and “Avengers: Secret Wars” (2027).
With that strong co-sign, Majors’s career looked secure. He would go on to star in some of Hollywood’s biggest comic-book blockbusters for a number of years, all the while establishing his dramatic acting credentials in movies like the war drama “Devotion” (2022) and the western “The Harder They Fall” (2021). Majors was now attached to high-profile projects like “48 Hours in Vegas,” a Lionsgate comedy about bad-boy basketball player Dennis Rodman, and Amazon’s “Da Understudy,” which was set to reunite Majors with his “Da 5 Bloods” director, Lee, despite the fact that he had not yet become a household name.
Actors from the A-list were excited to have him join them. Majors’s rise was “only a matter of time,” according to Michael B. Jordan, the director and actor of “Creed III,” who I met with in March. Majors was running late for the interview, carrying a portable speaker that was playing “Real Friends” by Kanye West, and he said that “Creed III” would be the first of many projects he and Jordan would work on together. “De Niro and Pacino,” he said, aiming high.
Those hopes have now been crushed: big studios that were formerly so keen to sign Majors will definitely turn elsewhere, even if he may yet be able to find employment in indie films, as several celebrities with troubled pasts have achieved.
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