The generous, wryly charming character actor André Holland gets a leading-man showcase in Rachael Abigail Holder's Sundance rom-dram "Love, Brooklyn," out in select theaters this weekend. He plays a down-and-out writer named Roger, who is navigating both a resurged relationship with his art-gallery-owner ex-girlfriend Casey (Nicole Beharie) and new love interest Nicole (DeWanda Wise), a single parent with emotional baggage of her own. The "Moonlight" star also led, earlier this year, Duke Johnson's "The Actor" for Neon and the SXSW premiere, still seeking distribution, "The Dutchman," as a New York businessman in marital freefall.

The Brooklyn-residing performer made waves in Barry Jenkins' all-timer "Moonlight" as the adult version of Kevin, Chiron's childhood friend with whom he had his first sexual experience. He also starred as a surgeon running an underground clinic for Black Americans in the Steven Soderbergh-directed cult Cinemax series "The Knick," which ran for two seasons between 2014 and 2015 but with a devoted following that's led to Jenkins spearheading potential new episodes. If only the right network will come through.

Holland formed a friendship with Soderbergh making "The Knick" that led to the Oscar-winning director both casting him in his 2019 sports drama for Netflix, "High Flying Bird," and to Soderbergh executive-producing "Love, Brooklyn." (Holland also produced that film via his own production, Harper Road.) Though the delicate drama received mixed reviews out of Sundance 2025, where it premiered in the Dramatic Competition, it's a promising feature debut from playwright-turned-filmmaker Holder, who captures the days and ways of her Black community in Brooklyn with the breezy, life-contemplating dialogue and reflection of a Rohmer movie.

Holland -- who also stood out in less leading roles in "Passing" and "Bones and All" but powered 2024 Sundance premiere "Exhibiting Forgiveness" as an artist dealing with past trauma -- spoke with IndieWire about his role in "Love, Brooklyn," where "The Knick" might be headed, and "Moonlight's" position in the canon of the best films of the 21st century. (The Best Picture winner was #5 on the New York Times' list in June.) Next up, Holland stars this fall in an off-Broadway revival of "Moonlight" scribe Tarell Alvin McCraney's post-incarceration fable "The Brothers Size," kicking off this weekend.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

IndieWire: Perhaps due to the popularity of another medical drama streaming on HBO Max "The Pitt," your series "The Knick" has seen renewed interest. What's the latest with plans for a Season 3?

André Holland: We're still fighting the fight. This iteration of it that we've created [for a third season] is one [where] we're just waiting on someone to give us the green light to go make it. We've already gotten pretty much the whole season mapped out. We've got a great couple of scripts that we feel really passionately about, and everybody who reads it, loves it. I think it's just a matter of finding the right home for the show. I'm hoping that this new surge of interest will get people to see how valuable the show was and how much of an appetite there is for it.

What's your relationship to "Moonlight" a decade later? Did you know this movie was going to take on the legacy it has? It's still regarded as one of the best films of the century, as recently as in The New York Times.

I'm super flattered to have been included in "Moonlight." And I think you're right, man, when we made that movie, nobody, I think it's safe to say, thought that it would end up having the life that it's had. Maybe Barry would disagree with me on that, but I don't think so. I still get stopped all the time [by] people who want to talk about "Moonlight," and especially younger people, who weren't even of age when that movie came out, and are discovering it now, and still find it useful. So it's one of the things I'm most proud of in my whole career.

In "Love, Brooklyn," you flex your romantic heartthrob credentials in a way that you maybe haven't since "Moonlight."

I have spent a lot of time playing characters in period pieces and often super dramatic situations, which I love. Obviously, I think about "Exhibiting Forgiveness" and even "Moonlight" and "The Knick" and other things, but I haven't had that many opportunities to do lighter, somewhat comedic things, which is odd, because when I was in school, in drama school, that was pretty much all I did. When I first came out of school, I did a lot of comedy. But you know how the business is, man: You do a couple things, and people think, well, that's what that person does. It was fun for me to get a chance to do something that felt different, that didn't spin on any kind of big drama, a sort of slice of life, observational: Let's just watch these people exist and try to move from point A to point B, and hope that that alone is enough.

What I liked about this movie is that it's about people in their 30s and in their 40s, and they're also creatives who are upwardly mobile, but they're successful. A lot of movies or shows set in Brooklyn are about people hustling or struggling in some way.

It's funny you say that. I live in Bed Stuy, and I had a party this weekend, my first house party. I feel very proud of the fact that it all came together; two hours before the party, I did not think it was going to happen. The people who came, it was such an interesting group of people... It was a wonderful collection of artists and thinkers and academics, and professionals and people who are living great lives and doing well for the most part, and who are civically engaged and parents in some cases. They have their struggles for sure, it's not like their lives are only about struggles. I want the movie to be a little slice of that community, that world, that I really treasure so much.

There is a sparsely populated vibe to many scenes in the film that likely came from budget limitations, but ended up reminding me of something like Kogonada's "Columbus": the empty backdrops against a few people onscreen serve to tell their inner story.

We didn't have the money to populate with a bunch of people. I'll just be candid with you: One of the things that I felt that I understood about the character of Roger, which, from my own life [was] I live in New York. I've been here for 25 years almost, and it's such a busy city. There's so many people everywhere, and it feels at times like, oh, there's always something to do. And yet, I often find myself feeling incredibly lonely in this city, which I never thought I would feel in a city like this. So I definitely wanted that feeling of loneliness that Roger is experiencing to come through. There were several times when we were doing shots, "Do we want to have people on the street, walking by, or do we not?" It started to feel like a real choice to say, no, let's just make it these people and see if we can at least gesture to that feeling of solitude that I know so well, that I think Roger was experiencing.

You're a producer, and you have a movie as an actor, "The Dutchman," still seeking distribution. We're in challenging times for film acquisitions. Do you feel a film like "Love, Brooklyn" is made for theaters or will find more of an audience on streaming?

We had been trying to make this for a number of years now. We went through various iterations of it. There was a point in which I thought it was going to find a home on streaming pretty quickly. People my age still want to go to the movies and see them with their friends. It has the chance to connect with a date-night audience, for people who want to do things together that don't feel particularly difficult to watch but are enjoyable and leave you with a good feeling. I'm hoping it connects with those kinds of folks.

What's your take on why the independent film market for acquisitions is a little soft at the moment? Especially for a film like "Love, Brooklyn," which took a minute to take off in terms of a sale.

[Everything] affecting everybody is hitting us too, just in terms of people being cautious with any kinds of investments, particularly in this film space. People don't know what theatrical even really means right now, and how to reconnect to those audiences, if people even want to come back to theaters. [There's] reluctance to deal with films that try to tackle complicated issues that feel like they put people in the crosshairs, right?

There's a project that we've [at Harper Road] been developing that had in it a moment of police violence that happened. A number of years ago, there probably would have been a larger appetite for a story like that, or more openness to a story like that. But I can feel that people are pulling away from stories like those. That's made our job more difficult, because so many of the projects that we're interested in making are ones that are complicated and difficult and that try to get at the center of these kinds of issues. But we're creative, and I think we're gonna find a way to get those stories told, and to get them to the audiences, to the people that want to see them, because that audience exists. We've just got to organize them, cultivate them, and serve them.