Leslie Odom Jr. (born 1981) is the American actor who played Victor Fielding in The Exorcist: Believer and originated Aaron Burr in Hamilton.
Quick Specs
| Born | Leslie Lloyd Odom Jr., August 6, 1981, Queens, New York City; raised in East Oak Lane, Philadelphia |
| Training | Carnegie Mellon University (BFA in drama, with honours, 2003) |
| Horror | Victor Fielding in The Exorcist: Believer (2023), his first horror lead |
| Stage | Aaron Burr in Hamilton (2014 to 2016, 2025, West End 2026); title role in Purlie Victorious (2023) |
| Screen | Sam Strickland in Smash (2012 to 2013); Dr. Arbuthnot in Murder on the Orient Express (2017); William Still in Harriet (2019); Sam Cooke in One Night in Miami… (2020); Lionel Toussaint in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) |
| Honours | Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical (2016); Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album (2016, Hamilton cast recording); two Oscar nominations for One Night in Miami… (2021) |
Who He Is
Leslie Lloyd Odom Jr. was born in Queens, New York City, on August 6, 1981, the son of Leslie Lloyd Odom, who worked in sales. The family moved to Philadelphia, and he grew up in the East Oak Lane section of the city: born in Queens, raised in Philadelphia. He went to the Julia R. Masterman School and the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, trained as a young performer at the city’s New Freedom Theatre, and sang solos in the choir at Canaan Baptist Church in Germantown.
He reached Broadway before university, making his debut in Rent in 1998 at 17, while still in high school, as a replacement in the role of Paul. Then he went and trained anyway. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in drama from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, graduating with honours in 2003 at 21, and moved to Los Angeles that summer. Carnegie Mellon runs through his career: Megan Hilty, a year behind him at the school, and Christian Borle, a fellow Carnegie Mellon graduate from the class of 1995, were later his castmates on Smash.
He has been married to the actress Nicolette Robinson since 2012. His memoir, Failing Up (2018), was written, he said, so that others could see that the road to success “may not be easy, but it can happen through hard work, faith and the support of friends and family.” He later co-wrote a children’s book with Robinson.
The Work, and What He Did in It
The Broadway debut was followed by a decade of work that the Hamilton story usually leaves out. In 2001 he sang in the ensemble of the one-night Broadway concert of Dreamgirls. After the move to Los Angeles he built a television career: Joseph Kayle in CSI: Miami across nine episodes from 2003 to 2006, Maliko Christo in ten episodes of Vanished, Freddy in Big Day (2006 to 2007), and guest spots on Gilmore Girls, Grey’s Anatomy, Supernatural and The Good Wife. His early feature credit was Red Tails (2012), the Tuskegee Airmen war film, in an ensemble led by Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrence Howard.
Leap of Faith brought him back to New York. He played Isaiah Sturdevant in the musical’s Los Angeles production in 2010 and on Broadway in 2012, and although the show closed quickly, it moved him east. That year he joined NBC’s Smash (2012 to 2013), the backstage drama about Broadway performers fighting for parts in a Marilyn Monroe musical, as Sam Strickland, a dancer in the ensemble of the show within the show. He recurred in the first season and was promoted to the main cast for the second and final season, playing a working Broadway dancer on television while being one in life. He also had recurring runs as Peter Collier, leader of the vigilante group Vigilance, in eight episodes of Person of Interest (2013 to 2014), and as Reverend Curtis Scott in seven episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (2013 to 2015).
Hamilton made him a star, and he originated Aaron Burr at every stage. He first played the role in the 2014 workshop, reunited with Lin-Manuel Miranda, with whom he had worked on the Encores! Off-Center production of Tick, Tick… Boom!, then in the Off-Broadway production at the Public Theater in early 2015, at 33, and on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre from August 2015. He played Burr, Hamilton’s friend, rival and eventual killer, as the show’s narrator-antagonist and its brooding centre of envy and patience. In The New York Times, Ben Brantley called him “suavely brooding” and his second-act number, “The Room Where It Happens,” a “full-fledged showstopper”; in Variety, Marilyn Stasio called him an “irresistibly charming villain” and “charismatic perfection.” Off-Broadway it brought a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical; on Broadway the same performance was recognised as a lead. At 34, in 2016, he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical and shared the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album as a principal soloist on the original cast recording, an ensemble award rather than a solo Grammy. His last performance in the original run was on July 9, 2016, and Brandon Victor Dixon succeeded him. The live capture of the original Broadway production, released on Disney+ in 2020, earned him a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie. It is a filmed stage performance, not a film adaptation.
His first prestige film after Hamilton was Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express (2017), in which he plays Dr. Arbuthnot, the upright military doctor travelling with Mary Debenham, in the all-star Christie ensemble. In Kasi Lemmons’s Harriet (2019), at 38, he plays William Still, the real abolitionist, author and Underground Railroad organiser who receives the escaped Harriet Tubman (Cynthia Erivo) in Philadelphia and helps her establish herself in freedom: a documented historical figure at the film’s moral hinge.
One Night in Miami… (2020) is the screen peak. Regina King directed Kemp Powers’s adaptation of his own play, a fictionalised meeting in a Miami hotel room in February 1964 between Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke, played by Odom, on the night of Clay’s title win. He played Cooke not as an impersonation but as an argument, the singer pressed by Malcolm X on what his voice is for, and he sang the Cooke material himself, including “A Change Is Gonna Come” near the close. He also co-wrote, with Sam Ashworth, and performed the original end-credits song, “Speak Now.” At 39 he received two Academy Award nominations for the one film, Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Song, and won neither. The film also brought him supporting-actor nominations at the BAFTAs, the Golden Globes, the Critics’ Choice Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
He had a supporting role in The Many Saints of Newark (2021), the Sopranos prequel film. In Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022), at 41, he is Lionel Toussaint, head scientist at tech billionaire Miles Bron’s company and one of the “Disruptors” gathered on Bron’s private Greek island for a murder-mystery weekend that turns real, with Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc investigating. He is the ensemble’s conscience in a lab coat, the employee whose warnings about Bron’s hydrogen fuel are the plot’s loaded gun, inside a gothic whodunit a year before his horror lead.
The Exorcist: Believer (2023) is his horror centrepiece and, so far, his only horror lead. David Gordon Green directed, from a screenplay by Green and Peter Sattler and a story by Scott Teems, Danny McBride and Green. It is the sixth Exorcist film and a direct sequel to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) that ignores the sequels in between. It opened in the United States on October 6, 2023, a week earlier than planned, to avoid the Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film. He was 42.
Odom plays Victor Fielding, a photographer and widowed single father in Georgia. In the prologue, Victor and his pregnant wife, Sorenne, are on their honeymoon in Haiti when the earthquake strikes, and with Sorenne gravely injured, Victor is told he must choose between saving his wife and saving their unborn child. Thirteen years later, having lost his faith, he is raising their daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett), alone. Angela and her friend Katherine West (Olivia O’Neill), daughter of Tony and Miranda West, go into the woods to try to contact Angela’s dead mother, vanish for three days, and come back with burned feet and no memory. Both girls are possessed; only Angela is Victor’s daughter.
He is this film’s Chris MacNeil, the parent the story is built around, not its priest. His neighbour Ann (Ann Dowd), a nurse who was once a novice, gives him Chris MacNeil’s memoir, and he seeks out Chris herself, Ellen Burstyn returning to her 1973 role, who is blinded by Katherine during an attempt at deliverance. The climax is an ecumenical exorcism, a Catholic priest, a Baptist pastor, a Pentecostal preacher and a rootwork healer assembled when the Church refuses to act, and it turns on Victor’s recovered faith and his refusal to choose between the two girls. The demon then tells him the truth he has lived against: in Haiti he chose Sorenne, and she died anyway, living only long enough for Angela to be born. Katherine’s father, Tony, is the one who makes the fatal choice, and he loses her. Linda Blair returns as Regan in a closing hospital reunion with Chris, a cameo filmed in secret; Blair also advised the young performers on set.
The film was made on a budget of $30 million and grossed about $136 million worldwide, figures distinct from the $400 million Universal and Peacock paid in July 2021 for the rights to a planned trilogy. Reviews were negative: the Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus called it “an inauspicious start to a planned new trilogy,” its Metacritic score sat in the generally unfavourable range, and audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a C. The second film, The Exorcist: Deceiver, was scheduled for April 18, 2025, but Green left in January 2024, Universal took it off the schedule, and the trilogy was abandoned. The next Exorcist film, from Mike Flanagan, is a new story and not a sequel to Believer. Odom is not attached to any further Exorcist film.
His first Broadway return after Hamilton was not Burr but the title role in the 2023 revival of Ossie Davis’s satirical farce Purlie Victorious, which he also produced alongside Nicolette Robinson and Jeffrey Richards. At 42 he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play, moving his Tony record across the line from musicals to plays, and the production received six Tony nominations and won one. It was also filmed for television.
Then Burr again. At 44 he returned to the role on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre for a limited engagement from September to November 2025, for the musical’s tenth anniversary, and from July 3 to September 5, 2026, he made his West End debut as Burr at London’s Victoria Palace Theatre. A documentary about the 2025 Broadway return has been announced.
The recordings run alongside everything. His five studio albums are Leslie Odom Jr. (2014, self-released and later reworked, a version that topped the US jazz albums chart in 2016), Simply Christmas (2016), Mr (2019), his first album of original material, The Christmas Album (2020) and When a Crooner Dies (2023). He voiced Owen Tillerman in the animated musical series Central Park (2020 to 2022), which brought another Primetime Emmy nomination in 2020.
Cool Verified Facts
- He made his Broadway debut in Rent at 17, still in high school, and then went to drama school anyway.
- He received two Oscar nominations for one film, as an actor and as a songwriter.
- His Grammy is for the Hamilton cast album, as a principal soloist, not a solo record.
- He originated Aaron Burr in the workshop, Off-Broadway and on Broadway, then played him again on Broadway in 2025 and in London in 2026.
- In The Exorcist: Believer both girls are possessed; only Angela is Victor’s daughter.
- Linda Blair’s Believer cameo was filmed in secret.
- Purlie Victorious made him a Tony nominee for a play as well as a Tony winner for a musical.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
“The Room Where It Happens” is the signature, a showstopper built on stillness. Burr watches other men enter the room for two acts, and when the explosion comes it is vocal and precise rather than physical. That restraint, weaponised, is what made the role his.
He keeps choosing the man history argued with. Burr, the vice-president who killed Hamilton and narrates his own exclusion; Sam Cooke, pressed on the purpose of his gift on the night it might change; William Still, the organiser history filed as a footnote to Tubman; Victor Fielding, the father whose defining act is a choice he made and must live with. Across stage, prestige film and horror he is the witness and rival, the man standing next to the legend, carrying the counter-argument.
Believer’s best behind-the-scenes story belongs to his film’s elders. Green has described filming the reunion of Linda Blair and Ellen Burstyn, the first time they had been in contact in many years, in a single first take, with the camera operator in tears.
His documented habit is duration. A decade of television and regional work separates the Rent debut at 17 from Burr at 33, and the credits themselves make the case his memoir makes: the apprenticeship was the method.
Why He Matters
For horror, Leslie Odom Jr. is the face of The Exorcist’s modern chapter, its Chris MacNeil, not its priest. Believer rebuilt the 1973 film’s structure around a parent and cast a Tony-winning stage actor with no previous horror lead to carry it: the sceptical, grieving father who has to be argued back into belief by a nurse, a memoir and Ellen Burstyn. Whatever the film’s reception, Victor Fielding is the protagonist of a direct sequel to one of the most famous horror films ever made, opposite its returning star, and that is a permanent line in the genre’s history.
Beyond horror, his record crosses every discipline: a Tony for originating Burr, a Grammy for the cast album, two Emmy nominations, a Tony nomination for a play, and the rare double of Oscar nominations as an actor and a songwriter for the same film. Burr is still his address, a decade on, on Broadway and now in London.