Cast and characters in Get Out (2017)

The complete cast of Get Out, the character each actor plays, and where they fit into the story. Written by Jordan Peele and directed by Jordan Peele.

Main cast

Daniel Kaluuya

as Chris Washington

Kaluuya's Chris is the role that introduced him to North American audiences as a leading-man presence, and the performance is built around a controlled wariness that the film keeps mistaking — deliberately — for politeness. The hypnosis-trapdoor scene, with the single tear running down his face while the camera holds on him in dead silence, became the film's most-imitated shot for a reason: Kaluuya holds the entire weight of Peele's central metaphor inside one fixed expression.

Allison Williams

as Rose Armitage

Williams is cast precisely against the Marnie-from-Girls Brooklyn-progressive register her HBO work had established, and the casting itself is part of the film's argument. The performance lives in the seams between the daughter who pulls a cop off her boyfriend in the opening act and the daughter who walks out of the upstairs bedroom in the third act with the same untroubled face she has been wearing the whole weekend.

Catherine Keener

as Missy Armitage

Keener's Missy is the script's most quietly load-bearing antagonist — a hypnotherapist mother who weaponises the language of therapy in a single tea-spoon-against-china conversation. The performance refuses the script's available temptation to play her as obviously dangerous; Keener's argument is that the danger is in the calmness, and the trapdoor opens precisely because the woman holding it sounds like she is asking how Chris is sleeping.

Bradley Whitford

as Dean Armitage

Whitford — the West Wing actor who built his career playing the most articulate liberal in the room — is exactly the casting Peele needed for the Armitage patriarch. The 'I would have voted for Obama a third time' line lands because Whitford has spent two decades training audiences to read his face as the trustworthy one in the building. The performance is a tonal trap, and Whitford walks into it on purpose.

Caleb Landry Jones

as Jeremy Armitage

Jones plays the Armitage younger brother as the family's most exposed nerve — a med-school son whose pleasure in physical proximity to Chris reads, on every line he speaks, as the part of the family's project the rest of them have learned to keep off the dinner-party register. The headlock he pulls Chris into on the lawn is the film's most concentrated single piece of casting against the script's polite surface.

Marcus Henderson

as Walter

Henderson's Walter has the film's hardest physical-performance job. The character has to read, in the daytime scenes, as a Black man who is recognisably present but whose vocabulary is one register too formal for the man Chris keeps catching glimpses of underneath — and, in the night-time scenes, as the actual occupant of the body trying to push back to the surface. Henderson's late-film moment is one of the cleanest single performances in any Peele film.

Crew