Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#3375
of 909177 performers
Top 1%
LeVar Burton represents the rare performer whose career became more ambitious with every decade — 30 years in, and LeVar is still choosing the harder script.
The essay
Our editors on the work, the patterns and the reason this body of work holds together.
LeVar Burton appears in 5 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without LeVar. Star Trek: First Contact is the clearest case: a film rated 7.3 by our editors, where the performance carries weight the script only implies.
The recognisable elements are transformation, versatility, physical performance. Watch two of these films back to back and the method separates from the material — the same instrument, tuned differently for romance, comedy, action. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with Will Gluck, Sam Liu, Stuart Baird and others, LeVar Burton helped set a standard other performers now audition against. Awards bodies have been slower than the work, which is usually the sign of a career built on choices rather than campaigns.
Star Trek: First Contact (1996) as Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge · One Night Only (2026) as Rick · Superman/Batman: Public Enemies (2009) as Black Lightning (voice)
Career snapshot
Ranked #3375 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
5
1996–2026
Career length
30 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
7.3
Star Trek: First Contact
Average Nutevio score
6.9
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
7.3
Star Trek: First Contact
Most frequent director
Will Gluck
1 film together
Longest collaboration
1×
With Will Gluck
Most common genre
Action
3 titles
Average runtime
1h 51m
Across catalogue work
Golden Globe wins
—
Unknown
Nutevio metric
Ten weighted categories, applied identically to everyone we cover.
Nutevio Performer Score
7.0
out of 10
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio metric
Cultural impact and legacy, measured separately from craft — how far the work travelled once it left the cinema.
Nutevio Influence Score
6.8
out of 10
A quieter influence — felt inside the films rather than across the industry.
How far the work travelled past the people who saw it first.
What survives once the release-week conversation has burned off.
Institutional acknowledgement, weighted but never decisive.
Years of chosen, relevant work rather than years merely employed.
Statuettes, read as evidence rather than verdict.
Roles named without needing the film named alongside them.
Directors who wrote parts because this performer existed.
The reading other performers now have to answer.
Actor DNA
A fingerprint derived from the roles themselves — register, range and the kind of film they carry.
The shape of a career
Every performance plotted in time. Hover a point to read the title behind it.
Peak years
Where the scores, the awards and the sheer volume of work agree with each other.
Best decade
1990s
7.3 average MV
The 1990s are where the work and the material meet. Star Trek: First Contact — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
1990s
7.3
Across 1 catalogue film in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
1990s
7.3
The public agrees most strongly about this stretch — useful context, and occasionally a decade behind our own reading.
Most awarded era
1990s
0 Academy Awards
Statuettes for the films themselves, which is the honest way to read an ensemble career. Star Trek: First Contact.
Most productive era
2000s
3 films
The busiest stretch of the catalogue — volume that reads as appetite rather than availability.
Range, mapped
Genres down the side, decades across the top. Warmer cells mean stronger titles.
| Genre | 1990s | 2000s | 2020s |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drama | — | 6.92 films | — |
| Action | 7.31 film | 6.72 films | — |
| Thriller | 7.31 film | 6.31 film | — |
| Comedy | — | — | 7.11 film |
| Romance | — | — | 7.11 film |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio · Highest rated performance · Career peak
Where our catalogue meets this career, as Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge. 7.3 on the Nutevio scale, the top of the catalogue for this performer. Weighing billing against the film's own quality, this is the point where everything aligned at once.
Most recent film
2026One Night Only
The current state of the argument, as Rick.
Our order
Every performance in the catalogue, ordered by Nutevio Score.
Every title
Filter by genre or decade, and compare any two titles side by side.
5 of 5 films
as Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge
Directed by Jonathan Frakes
as Rick
Directed by Will Gluck
as Black Lightning (voice)
Directed by Sam Liu
as Martin Luther King, Jr.
Directed by Michael Mann
as Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge
Directed by Stuart Baird
From the library
Every movie and TV credit stored for this name in the Nutevio catalogue — filter by media, role or sort by rating.
Loading credits…
The defining work
#1
Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge
Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
Performance score7.4
The performance the rest of the career is read through. Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge gives LeVar Burton a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Rick
One Night Only (2026)
Performance score7.2
One Night Only asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Rick is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
Black Lightning (voice)
Superman/Batman: Public Enemies (2009)
Performance score7.0
Superman/Batman: Public Enemies asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Black Lightning (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#4
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ali (2001)
Performance score6.7
Ali asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Martin Luther King, Jr. is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movieStart here
A guided path through the work, ordered so each film explains the next.
Best entry point
as Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge
Start here. Star Trek: First Contact is the clearest statement of what LeVar Burton does — accessible, 111 minutes, and rated 7.3 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet LeVar at the most legible performance, then move forward in time so each film reads as a response to the one before it rather than a repetition of it.
Ali (2001)
A deliberate change of key after Star Trek: First Contact — same instrument, unfamiliar tuning, and the reason range gets mentioned.
Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
A deliberate change of key after Ali — same instrument, unfamiliar tuning, and the reason range gets mentioned.
Superman/Batman: Public Enemies (2009)
Keeps the action register of Star Trek: Nemesis but asks for a colder reading of it.
One Night Only (2026)
A deliberate change of key after Superman/Batman: Public Enemies — same instrument, unfamiliar tuning, and the reason range gets mentioned.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Jonathan Frakes
Director
1 film together
Notably Star Trek: First Contact
Michael Mann
Director
1 film together
Notably Ali
Stuart Baird
Director
1 film together
Notably Star Trek: Nemesis
Sam Liu
Director
1 film together
Notably Superman/Batman: Public Enemies
Will Gluck
Director
1 film together
Notably One Night Only
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Jonathan Frakes
Director
1 film together · 7.3 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Star Trek: First ContactWill Gluck
Director
1 film together · 7.1 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
One Night OnlySam Liu
Director
1 film together · 7.1 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Superman/Batman: Public EnemiesMichael Mann
Director
1 film together · 6.8 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
AliStuart Baird
Director
1 film together · 6.3 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Star Trek: NemesisSix degrees
Follow the thread outward — director, film, co-star, and the film after that.
Categories of our own
Six editorial categories we apply to every performer we cover.
Most rewatchable
Star Trek: First Contact
as Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge
The one that survives a fourth viewing. Nothing in the performance depends on surprise, which is why it keeps paying out.
Most emotional performance
One Night Only
as Rick
Grief played at conversational volume. The film never asks the audience to cry; the performance simply makes it difficult not to.
Most influential performance
Star Trek: First Contact
as Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
Ali
as Martin Luther King, Jr.
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
Star Trek: First Contact
as Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge
If the career had to be argued in a single scene, our editors would pick one from this film and rest the case.
In their films' words
“You can build a whole film around a performer who knows when not to speak. LeVar Burton has known it for a long time.”
Head to head
Put two careers on the same scale and see where the argument actually sits.
Ours alone
Recognitions handed out by this desk, on criteria no awards body uses.
Career Achievement
Awarded
30 years of relevant work — not merely a long career, but a long career of choices.
Modern Classic Performer
Awarded
Defining performances delivered inside the last twenty-five years, in films already being taught rather than merely remembered.
Action Legend
Awarded
3 catalogue titles in action, each one a reference point for the films that followed.
Our desk
Best ending, best opening, best twist and the rest — categories we apply to everyone we cover.
Best ending
Star Trek: First Contact
as Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
Star Trek: First Contact
as Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
One Night Only
as Rick
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
Star Trek: First Contact
as Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
Star Trek: First Contact
as Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
Superman/Batman: Public Enemies
as Black Lightning (voice)
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
Superman/Batman: Public Enemies
as Black Lightning (voice)
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
Ali
as Martin Luther King, Jr.
The public vote sits below ours on this one, and the direction is the reason for the gap.
If you like this performer
Robert De Niro
Works with the same directors — shared collaborators
Al Pacino
Works with the same directors — shared collaborators
Michael Caine
Built a career in the same territory: adventure and drama
David Krumholtz
Built a career in the same territory: action and adventure
Ted Levine
Works with the same directors — shared collaborators
Edward Norton
Built a career in the same territory: comedy and adventure
Have your say
Community
Which LeVar Burton performance holds up best?
Our readers argue about this one. Make your case, or read the ranked debate already in progress.
Join the conversation
Reference
Continue exploring
Trending performers
Directors they work with
Collections to read next
