AARP’s Movies for Grownups: Black Actors We Love Over 50

Colman Domingo

The 56-year-old actor has been seemingly everywhere in recent years, earning back-to-back Oscar nominations for Rustin in 2024 (in which he played civil rights activist Bayard Rustin) and Sing Sing in 2025 (in which he starred as a wrongly convicted man who leads a theater troupe in the infamous prison). He’s also a three-time Movies for Grownups Award nominee, earning nods for Sing Sing and The Color Purple and winning best actor for Rustin. And he’s proved himself as an incredible scene-stealer, playing wildly different characters in Zola, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Drive-Away Dolls and the recent adaptation of The Running Man.

But Domingo is hardly a late bloomer. Before his breakout TV role on Fear the Walking Dead in 2015, he was an established stage performer and writer who had made his Broadway debut in the Tony-winning musical Passing Strange and later earned a Tony nomination for The Scottsboro Boys in 2011. 

“I’ve been working for over 34 years, and to have … these moments in my 50s is extraordinary,” Domingo told AARP in 2025, when he accepted the Movies for Grownups best ensemble award for Sing Sing. “I think it’s your life experience and all that you’ve gone through, the highs and lows. If you keep going, you never know exactly where, how it’s useful in your work, especially at this stage where you have so much to pull from. It’s beautiful.”

Idris Elba

The 53-year-old actor is the kind of performer who can disappear into a role. Look no further than his breakout portrayal of drug kingpin Stringer Bell in the acclaimed HBO series The Wire, which was so convincing, many viewers might have assumed Elba was a Baltimore native, just like his character. 

But the London-born actor is a true international star, who followed up his dark role on The Wire with a comic guest turn on The Office and a leading role in the BBC thriller Luther, the latter of which earned him four Emmy nominations. He also earned a Movies for Grownups award nomination for best TV actor for the Apple TV series Hijack in 2024.

But Elba is too big to be contained on the small screen, earning Golden Globe nominations for playing a ruthless warlord in Beasts of No Nation and the anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. He brings similar prestige to his roles in the Marvel and DC Cinematic Universes and a weighty gravitas when voicing animated characters in Zootopia and The Jungle Book. 

With a swagger and style that goes unmatched, Elba was named AARP’s Movies for Grownups Hottest Actor Over 50 last year. “I’m not afraid of difficult things or challenges that make me uncomfortable,” he said at the time, and his nonacting side hustles, which include rapping and kickboxing, prove he’s always game to step out of his comfort zone.

Taraji P. Henson

The 55-year-old had her breakout role in Hustle & Flow, in which she also made her singing debut, for the Oscar-winning original song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.” She joined rap group Three 6 Mafia at the 2006 Academy Awards, where they made history for delivering the first hip-hop performance at the ceremony.

Music continued to be an important element of Henson’s acting career. She reunited with Hustle & Flow costar Terrence Howard for Empire, playing the fierce and fabulous Cookie Lyon in the Fox drama series set around a hip-hop label (and earning two Emmy nominations for her standout performance). She later played blues singer Shug Avery in the musical adaptation of The Color Purple, for which she won a 2024 Movies for Grownups award for best ensemble and was nominated for best supporting actress. 

She also works as a tireless advocate for mental health awareness, having launched the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation in honor of her late father, who struggled with mental illness after serving in Vietnam. 

“Everybody thought I created Cookie from a woman. It was my dad. He had some of the most amazing zingers,” Henson said, after receiving an honorary Purpose Prize from AARP in 2024.

Samuel L. Jackson

There are few performers with as many credits on their résumé as the 77-year-old Jackson, who is the highest-grossing actor of all time, thanks to roles in blockbuster franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars. He has more than 200 screen credits, including notable collaborations with Spike Lee (School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever and Chi-Raq) and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight). He also was nominated for the Movies for Grownups best actor award in 2007 for Freedomland.

Jackson is as much at ease in dramas like Eve’s Bayou, The Red Violin and The Piano Lesson as he is in less-serious flicks like Snakes on a Plane and Kong: Skull Island. Diverse content has always been important to him as an entertainer and a performer. 

“Quality movies are movies that make me happy, a movie I would’ve gone to see,” Jackson has said about how he doesn’t differentiate between his projects. “I’m not trying to make people cry. I’m not trying to do the profound-storytelling thing. I was entertaining.” Ultimately, he enjoys his job and recognizes the privilege of such a long and successful career, and it helps he has support from his wife, fellow actor and director LaTanya Richardson. “[O]ne of the things she had to accept is that I’m going to go to work,” Jackson told AARP in 2024. “I’m going to go to work all the time until, you know, it’s time.”

Delroy Lindo

Lindo, 73, is a celebrated veteran of the stage and screen, best known for his collaborations with director Spike Lee, who cast him in Malcolm X, Crooklyn, Clockers and Da 5 Bloods (the latter earned him a 2021 Movies for Grownups award nom for best actor). Other notable film roles include Get Shorty and The Cider House Rules, and Lindo also has earned acclaim for his appearances on the TV series The Good Fight and Unprisoned.

But it was his turn as bluesman Delta Slim in 2025’s Sinners that brought the actor some of the best notices of his career — including his first Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor (one of the film’s record-breaking 16 nods, the most of any film in Oscar history). 

Just weeks before that nomination, Lindo won a Movies for Grownups best supporting actor award for his Sinners role. “Because I’m so deeply proud of this work, it’s even more gratifying that audiences have embraced the work in the way that they have, to the point where they’re going back to see the work multiple times, and that is incredibly rewarding and affirming,” he said on the red carpet, adding: “[W]e live in a youth-oriented culture, and oftentimes, what more mature practitioners bring to the table can sometimes be overlooked.”

Sheryl Lee Ralph

When Ralph won an Emmy in 2022 for her role on Abbott Elementary — becoming the first Black woman to win best supporting actress for a comedy series in 35 years — she sang a few lines of Dianne Reeves’ “Endangered Species.”

“I am a woman, I am an artist, and I know where my voice belongs,” she belted, recalling her role as Deena Jones in the original cast of the Broadway musical Dreamgirls, for which she earned a Tony nomination for best actress in 1982. 

But Dreamgirls was hardly her breakout; she’d made her film debut in Sidney Poitier’s crime comedy A Piece of the Action in 1977. She recalled what her director and costar told her when she made that film at 19: “Mr. Poitier said to me, ‘This industry has very little to offer you right now, but if you hone your craft, if you continue to study, if you continue to let them know that you are someone to be paid attention to, I expect great things from you.’” That’s why Ralph’s Emmy win 45 years later, for her performance as the dignified teacher Barbara Howard, was so impressive. Her longevity is not just a testament to not giving up; it’s also proof that a career’s worth of greatness can finally pay off. “I never keep a bucket list, but every time another award came through, my friends would say, ‘You checked another one off the list,’  ” Ralph told AARP in 2023. “It just shows that if you really have a dream, you can make it come true.”

Octavia Spencer

Spencer, 55, had landed countless TV appearances and bit parts in films before her big break in the 2011 drama The Help, in which she played a fiery and unflappable maid in segregated Mississippi. Despite being a part of a star-studded ensemble that included Viola Davis, Allison Janney, Emma Stone and Jessica Chastain, Spencer proved to be the film’s true standout — and the role delivered her a Golden Globe and an Oscar. 

“Earning an Oscar in your 40s … tells people that times have changed,” Spencer told AARP in 2017. “I tell you what: You certainly appreciate it more. You know that you’re not entitled to it and that it comes from a place of respect.”

Having earned that respect, Spencer would later command it again — not once but twice. She earned two additional nominations in the supporting actress category for Hidden Figures and The Shape of Water, which set Oscar records: She is the first Black woman to receive back-to-back Oscar noms and is the second-most nominated Black actress to date after Davis, her costar in The Help.

Alfre Woodard

There are few actors as respected as Woodard, 73, who has been mesmerizing audiences for more than five decades, since she made her Broadway debut in 1975. 

“I have six decades [behind me],” she told AARP in 2016, reflecting on her accomplished career — one that still shows no signs of slowing down. “I feel like the first decade, and I have a feeling I will keep feeling like that.”

Her big breaks came in 1983, when she appeared in the film drama Cross Creek (for which she earned an Oscar nomination) and on the TV series Hill Street Blues (for which she won her first Emmy). More acclaimed TV performances followed — Woodard has four Emmy wins and a whopping 18 nominations — including roles on St. Elsewhere, L.A. Law, Desperate Housewives, The Practice and True Blood, plus her award-winning titular role in the made-for-TV movie Miss Evers’ Boys. 

Woodard is known for playing headstrong characters on the big screen, too, with notable performances in Passion Fish, Crooklyn and 12 Years a Slave. In recent years, the prolific actor has jumped between the big and small screens in projects as varied as the prison drama Clemency (which earned her a 2020 Movies for Grownups award nom for best actress), the action thriller The Gray Man, the sci-fi animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks and the upcoming The Boroughs.