Rise to Fame
A mute alien with three toes lands in Harlem in 1984, and Morton had to carry the whole film without saying a word. John Sayles' Brother from Another Planet was a low-budget indie shot at night in four weeks, but it gave him room to build a character entirely through expression and physicality. He won Best Actor at the Catalonian International Film Festival for it. The Terminator 2 role came partly because he walked into a Cameron pitch and quoted Richard Pryor about how Hollywood writes Black characters out of sci-fi early, on the assumption they won't be around in the future. Cameron wanted a Black character central to the whole plot.
In the Spotlight
Playing Eli Pope on Scandal is technically a guest role, which makes his 2014 Emmy win stranger and more impressive. His season 3 monologue about being twice as good to get half as much became a cultural event, particularly for Black audiences who recognized that speech from their own parents. Morton has said the response was overwhelming. Off-Broadway, Turn Me Loose (2016) as Dick Gregory won him a Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Actor. A Broadway revival of ART in 2025 suggests he has no intention of coasting on fifty years of credits.
Side Notes
His father was a U.S. Army intelligence officer, which is why Morton spent parts of his childhood in West Germany and Okinawa instead of New York. After his father died when he was 10, he went to Catholic military school and briefly considered the priesthood before Hofstra University's drama program intervened. The labored breathing in Miles Dyson's death scene in Terminator 2 came from his own collapsed lung after a car accident. Outside film and TV, he works as an Innocence Project ambassador and co-hosts Inside the Black Box, a series about Black artists' experiences in entertainment.