by Shawn Nowlin
Two years ago, acclaimed filmmaker Ryan Cooglar announced that he was working on a new project. While details were limited at the time, he said it would arguably be his best work to date. Considering he directed both “Black Panther” and “Creed,” that was saying a lot.
Both the American Film Institute and the National Board of Review listed “Sinners” among the top ten films of 2025.
During the Juke Joint dance scene near the film’s halfway mark, Alex Huyhn appears on screen during a hallucinatory sequence. A Roanoke native, Huynh attended Northside High School.
At the 2004 Pan American Wushu Championships, the martial artist won gold in gunshu and silver in changquan. That year, he appeared in the short film “The Young Master.” Since then, he’s been in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Fight Science.”
“My sister and I moved to Roanoke to be raised by our grandparents when we were very young. We had just lost our mother to cancer, so there was a hole in our hearts that needed filling,” Huyhn said in different interviews leading up to the release of “Sinners.”
He added, “My sister, always the strong and selfless person she is, took the initiative to help her baby brother cope and played to the one thing she knew I enjoyed: storytelling. I knew early on that I wanted to bring people together and entertain audiences.”
In 2025, Huyhn earned a Primetime Emmy Award nomination in the category Outstanding Stunt Performance for his work on the television program “FBI: Most Wanted.” Since Huynh currently lives in Los Angeles, more opportunities are bound to present themselves.
Once Warner Bros. greenlit “Sinners” with a production budget of $100 million, Cooglar asked for first-dollar gross, final cut privilege and ownership of the movie 25 years after its release. Within a month, those terms were agreed to.
Next up for the USC School of Cinematic Arts alum will be directing Black Panther 3 and developing a new reboot of X Files, the TV series.
