Top 5 Joseph Quinn Movies, Ranked

There’s a specific kind of actor who can walk into a massive Hollywood production and make you forget about the budget. Joseph Quinn is that actor. Whether he’s playing a scraggly indie misfit or a scene-chewing Roman emperor who commands the screen with unsettling calm, something about him always feels lived-in and real, which is exactly why his film career has taken off so fast. Quinn has a particular gift for stillness, letting a single glance or a barely-there smile carry more weight than a page of dialogue ever could. At TV Hulk, we ranked these performances based on how completely Quinn disappears into each role and how much the work stays with you after the credits roll. Five films in, and the range is already striking.

5. Hoard (2023)

Michael is a difficult character to spend time with, and Quinn leans into that discomfort completely. In Luna Carmoon’s strange, intensely personal British indie, he plays a man who re-enters the life of a young woman raised in chaos. There’s a scene where he sits across from her in a cluttered flat, barely speaking, and rather than fill the silence he lets his hands rest completely still in his lap — the kind of deliberate stillness that reads as someone who learned long ago to take up as little space as possible. It’s restrained in a way that’s almost unsettling. The film earned real attention at Venice, and that feels right for a performance built almost entirely on what Quinn refuses to do.

4. Gladiator II (2024)

Emperor Geta arrives on screen like someone who has never once been told no, and Quinn plays that with an almost gleeful commitment. Where his co-emperor Caracalla is cold and calculating, Geta is volatile and weirdly funny, the kind of ruler who might applaud an execution or throw a tantrum in the same breath. There’s a moment in the imperial box during the arena sequences where Quinn lets a slow, delighted smile creep across his face while chaos unfolds below him, and it’s genuinely unsettling how charming he makes it. He holds his own against a cast full of heavyweights, never once getting swallowed by the scale of it all.

3. The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

The trailers alone make the case. Quinn looks to have found the version of Johnny Storm that actually works: cocky without being insufferable, reckless without losing the audience’s goodwill. As the Human Torch, he plays someone who takes obvious delight in the chaos he causes, and there’s real comedic timing in the way he bounces off the rest of the First Family. What the trailers make unmistakable is one specific physical choice — the grin that spreads across his face just before he flames on, like Johnny isn’t reacting to danger but welcoming it as the excuse he’s been waiting for.

2. Warfare (2025)

The SEAL Quinn plays doesn’t have a hero arc. That’s the whole point. Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s brutal, almost real-time war film drops you into a Navy SEAL operation with no score, no clean narrative, and no emotional release valve. Quinn plays it like someone who’s decided the only way through is to just keep moving. There’s a sequence where the SEAL has to keep functioning while everything around him is falling apart, and the way Quinn plays it, quiet and mechanical and barely holding, hits harder than any conventional breakdown scene would have. The tell is in his hands and his face — his hands stay busy, deliberate, never stopping, while his face gives almost nothing away, and that gap between his hands and his face is where the whole performance lives. Watch the moment he gets the order to move out and just nods, once, eyes already somewhere else.

1. A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)

Eric is not the protagonist of this story, and Quinn plays him with full awareness of that fact. Lupita Nyong’o’s Samira is the emotional center, and Eric exists in orbit around her: a stranger who attaches himself to her during the alien invasion of New York, desperate for connection in a world that has made human contact almost impossible. What makes the performance work is how much Quinn communicates without dialogue, since the film’s rules demand silence. A glance held a beat too long, the way he positions himself near Samira without crowding her, a moment where he almost laughs at something absurd and then catches himself, it all adds up to a fully realized person rather than a plot device. His chemistry with Nyong’o is a huge reason audiences connected so personally with the film. Quinn carries real vulnerability here, and it peaks in the pizza scene, where his expression cycles through grief, gratitude, and something close to joy in the space of about ten seconds without a single word spoken.