PROFILE Online

Nesta Cooper:
the Medium and the Message

On acting, Quakerism, and speaking truth to power .

spring 2025

In Dope Thief – a new series from Apple TV+ – Nesta Cooper is not here to play it safe. As Michelle Taylor, the Philadelphia lawyer, Cooper travels across an expansive emotional and ethical register, never shying away from the contradictions of her character. Cooper’s performance enlivens and bears witness to all that action sequences leave unsaid. After a decade of acting, I asked Cooper to reveal the trajectory and tactics for her biggest role yet.

Born in Mississauga, a suburb just outside of Toronto, Nesta grew up in proximity to the diaspora of her father’s home country, Jamaica. She grew to cherish her Jamaican heritage after eventually moving across Canada to Vancouver Island, a predominantly white community. It was through that whiplash and contrast that Cooper came to understand the importance of identity, a driving force for her life at large and the storytelling she aims to champion.

Nesta discovered her preferred medium for storytelling at age twelve, when she began to watch TV and movies in earnest. In middle school, Cooper would often tune into anime programs like Inuyasha, Cardcaptors, and Naruto. Throughout high school, she gravitated toward CW-type shows — One Tree Hill, a clear favorite.

“Looking back, it’s funny, because it wasn’t necessarily about diversity. There were Black characters, but I think what really drew me in was the intensity of teen drama. I loved watching actresses like Sophia Bush or Hilarie Burton go through these incredibly angsty, emotional storylines. Even though my life was nothing like that—I wasn’t sheltered, but I was just a puritan child for some reason. I wasn’t out there getting my heart broken every week, but somehow, I just would cry with them and something about the magic of that made me want to do it for other people,” she tells me with a slight tickle in her voice.

Affirming the intensity of young, female emotionality was an important goal for Cooper in her early career. “I believe that emotions are energy in motion—everyone experiences them in waves. But when you’re younger, you don’t have the tools to regulate them yet. It can feel all-consuming. I think that’s why I connected so strongly to emotional storytelling.” This impulse prompted her to make her LA move at twenty-two, a transition facilitated by her role in Reality High, which got her an American working visa, and the excitement of her growing conviction. “You couldn't have stopped me from moving to LA. I just was like, this is my story,” she tells with the gentle laugh of someone who has seen their childhood dreams come to fruition.

After a decade in the industry, with her roles evolving in nuance and complexity, Cooper’s learned many lessons, and her approach to acting has changed accordingly. In the earliest stages of her career, channeling her real-life emotional intensity into her characters was not as easy as anticipated. “I couldn’t cry in class. I had trained myself to equate survival with keeping my emotions in check.” But eventually, Cooper combined hard work and the Larry Moss approach, requiring actors to use personal experience to place themselves in the emotional mindset of a character. Tapping into her wealth of emotionality became a practice for Cooper. “I had to make a commitment to allowing myself to feel emotions as they came, no matter where I was. Over time, that made the barrier between my emotions and my work thinner and thinner, until it became easier to access.”

But this thinning between character and self is not without its pitfalls. At thirty-one, Cooper has started to question whether that emotional transference is essential to her method, especially when it can place an undue burden on actors off-camera. Reflecting on this phenomenon, Cooper tells me: “In my 20s, I poured so much of my soul into my work in a way that wasn’t always healthy. When you use personal trauma to enhance your acting, it can take a toll. It’s like opening a wound every single day on set. And while some actors swear by that approach, I’ve realized that I need a more sustainable way to work—one that doesn’t require me to re-traumatize myself.”

Cooper's honest meditations mirror the delicate balance between emotional experience and technical skill, "It's a strange industry where the more you're crying, the more intense your trauma, the louder the applause. That can be a mind-bending experience early in a career. But as you grow, you become more confident in your skill on a technical level and learn to protect yourself more.”

DRESS Singulier Vintage, EARRINGS Stylist’s Own

Cooper’s new approach reflects a phenomenon that occurs to many women as they break off from the strife of a young artist’s life – gaining enough hindsight to realize that aesthetic quality is not intrinsically linked to pain, angst, and anguish. Deriving a creative practice from a place of happiness, love, and wonderment may ultimately be the key to longevity in the film and TV industry, especially as it experiences its own share of growing pains.

“Right now, the industry is operating from a place of fear. A lot of decisions are being made out of job insecurity—actors, writers, directors, executives, agents. Everyone is just trying to keep things afloat,” Cooper reflects candidly. But she’s not one to give into cynical narratives about Hollywood’s decay and collapse. “I don’t know the exact timeline, but I do think we’re headed toward a new era with more diversity and original ideas. Hollywood will continue to adapt, as it always has, evolving with society.” The pendulum always swings back, and to Cooper, important and original storytelling is where we’re bound to vault ourselves toward next.

For Cooper, this potential turned kinetic in the highly anticipated Apple TV+ adaptation of Dennis Tafoya's Philadelphia-set crime novel Dope Thief, written and directed by Peter Craig, known for hits like The Batman, The Hunger Games Mockingjay Part 1 & 2, and Gladiator II. The pilot is notably directed by Craig’s gladiatorial companion, Ridley Scott.Dope Thief follows two recovering addicts Ray and Manny, played by Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura respectively, turned poser DEA agents who raid small-scale drug operations. Things turn sour when they accidentally raid a major liquid meth operation run by skilled killers, now out for their blood. Nesta Cooper enters at the end of episode two as Michelle Taylor – a defense attorney hired to arrange the release of Ray’s incarcerated father.

While Cooper’s character Michelle presents as cool, calm, and collected, the actress was far from that prior to shooting. “The headspace before shooting was just panic. I was so nervous to work with Brian, Marin, Ridley, Peter—everyone. I felt out of my league” she confesses with the warmth and honesty of her on-screen character. Conquering the panic meant decisive amounts of research into Michelle's goals. Initially, Cooper couldn’t pin down her character’s driving motivations: why is she drawn to Ray? Why does she feel compelled to save him? In Dope Thief, Michelle Taylor is notably a Quaker. In a scene in episode three, where Ray and Michelle meet to discuss his father’s impending release, she divulges her faith to him. Her personal intercession is powerfully realized because of how deep Cooper went into her character's philosophy.

“I realized she’s the kind of person who wants to teach others how to love themselves by reflecting that love back to them. Her spirituality is central to her, but because she’s a Quaker, it’s not tied to a rigid religious institution.” She exudes a powerful yet tolerant confidence, a method employed to aid in excavating Ray’s inner light, so stifled by the circumstances of his life.

Cooper's excavation revealed the similarities between Quakerism and acting as spiritual pursuits. In both approaches, the individual serves as a medium for an amorphous energy or being, not yet made physically manifest. Through voice, speaking out of a pregnant and pensive silence, a person can act as a medium, allowing what is not yet perceptible to move others. In both acting and the Quaker tradition, you need to both be yourself and erase yourself, Cooper learned by way of Michelle “The way I was trained involved three steps: research, intellectualizing the character, and finding the emotional core. The final step is surrendering. I think that’s similar to Quakers. You do all the work—knowing who the character is, what they want, their backstory—but when the action begins, you have to throw all that out and be as present as possible. Whatever spontaneous, natural human reaction comes out is what you need to follow. It’s like imitating life. The preparation keeps you on track, but when you’re in the moment, you have to surrender to whatever comes naturally.”

Cooper’s message resonates with motivating clarity. When we surrender to our craft—losing ourselves in the power of an unspoken story—there’s no limit to how far our messages can travel. A silence that becomes a scream. A future we enact into being.

Read more stories

fashion ISSUE 18

PROFILE ISSUE 18

Profile ISSUE 18