Justice Smith, the franchise sidekick Heated Rivalry fans fought over

Justice Smith

Photo: Greg2600 / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 9, 1995 Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Pokémon Detective Pikachu, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Awards	Golden Globe

When Crave announced that Justice Smith would play Harris Drover in the second season of Heated Rivalry, the loudest argument online was not about whether he could act the part. It was about his waist. In Rachel Reid’s novels Harris is stocky and broad-chested, soft around the middle, and part of the fandom that turned the hockey romance into a phenomenon wanted that body on screen. Smith, who is lean, answered by thanking the strangers filling his inbox with support. It was an odd welcome for an actor who has spent most of his career being cast for anything but his body: the nervous friend, the kid who explains the plot, the one who screams when the dinosaur shows up.

That gap, between how the industry has used him and what he does when he is given room, is the real subject of his career. Blockbusters made his face familiar. Two small, unsettling projects made critics look at him properly. The next year will show which of those actors the business has decided he is.

Justice Elio Smith was born in Los Angeles on 9 August 1995 and grew up in Anaheim, in the Orange County suburbs where, as he told Jesse Tyler Ferguson on the podcast Dinner’s On Me, he was bullied through high school. Theatre was the exit. He acted in local productions around the county and graduated from the Orange County School of the Arts in 2013.

His first sizeable film part was Radar, the best friend with the dry lines, in Paper Towns, the John Green adaptation. Then Baz Luhrmann gave him the lead in The Get Down, Netflix‘s lavish musical drama about the birth of hip-hop in the burning Bronx of the 1970s. Smith played Ezekiel Figuero, a teenage poet turning himself into an MC, and prepared by living in a Bronx apartment for the length of the shoot. Netflix let the expensive series go after a single season, released in two parts, but it put him on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and gave him a calling card that no casting director could ignore.

He used it first on stage. In early 2017 he went to New York to play opposite Lucas Hedges in Anna Jordan’s Yen, a raw play about two neglected teenage brothers, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. The production brought him Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel nominations, an early sign that the camera was missing something.

Hollywood then did what it usually does with a likeable young actor. It parked him beside the spectacle. In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom he was Franklin Webb, a systems technician who spends much of the film shrieking, a part he repeated in the sequel. In Pokémon Detective Pikachu he was the human lead, Tim Goodman, playing straight man to a digital detective voiced by Ryan Reynolds. In Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves he was Simon, the insecure sorcerer in Chris Pine‘s crew of misfits. Between the franchises came teen romances such as All the Bright Places, opposite Elle Fanning, in which he played a troubled boy and carried most of the film’s weight.

The results say more about the parts than about the actor. Fallen Kingdom earned him a Golden Raspberry nomination for worst supporting actor, a joke aimed at a role written almost entirely as panic. The American Society of Magical Negroes, Kobi Libii’s satire that finally gave him an adult studio lead, set out to mock the Hollywood habit of Black characters who exist to rescue white ones. Critics found it timid, its Rotten Tomatoes score settled around 30 percent, and it left cinemas three weeks after opening with about 2.5 million dollars. A film about how the industry uses Black actors became a small case of the problem it described: Smith is precise in it, and the script mostly asks him to react.

The turn came from the opposite direction. Smith came out as queer on Instagram in June 2020, in a post written in solidarity with Black trans lives, and named his partner at the time, the actor Nicholas L. Ashe. He then played Chester, a gender-fluid high-school student, in HBO Max’s Genera+ion, and Jane Schoenbrun cast him as Owen in I Saw the TV Glow, the A24 film about two lonely teenagers bound by a late-night television show, widely read as an allegory of trans repression. Smith plays the same man across decades, folding inward, and the performance is built from what Owen will not say. It brought nominations for best lead performance at the Gotham Awards and the Film Independent Spirit Awards, the first time awards voters treated him as the centre of a film rather than its support.

He has kept the stage close. In 2024 he played Adi in an off-Broadway Creditors at the Minetta Lane Theatre, and he lent his voice, movements and face to the horror video game The Quarry. In a podcast conversation published in December 2025 he said he would never date a woman again, “not because I’m not attracted to them”, but because he disliked “the feeling of having to be the man in the relationship”. The line travelled as gossip. It reads better as an actor describing a performance he no longer wants to give off screen.

His most recent release was Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, Ruben Fleischer’s third instalment of the heist series, in which he joined the illusionists as Charlie alongside Dominic Sessa and Ariana Greenblatt. Ahead are two films that point in very different directions. White Elephant is Eli Craig’s Christmas horror comedy, in which a gift exchange among friends turns lethal, with Nick Jonas and Kathryn Newton. Trust the Man is Will Graham’s Vietnam War thriller about an Army intelligence officer and the decorated soldier he is assigned to investigate, starring Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff, shot in New Jersey this summer; Smith’s role has not been disclosed.

Then comes Harris. Jacob Tierney’s series, made by Crave in Canada and carried by HBO Max in the United States, returns in spring 2027 with Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie back as Shane and Ilya, and Smith paired with Charlie Gillespie as Troy Barrett, the traded player whom Harris, Ottawa’s social media manager, sets out to pull out of his shell. Reid answered the casting complaints by reminding readers how many of them had doubted the first season’s leads. The doubt about Smith is a different one, and a more useful one for him: for once, nobody is asking whether he can be the lead. They are arguing about what kind of lead he should be.