All 9 'Sinners' Characters, Ranked

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Michael B. Jordan in 'Sinners' smoking a cigarette outside, after a bloodbath the night before

Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women's sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post. (She still misses those nap pods.) She's covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling's best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan, she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter.

It’s been months, and Sinners still hasn’t stopped showing up in feeds, chats, and “best of” lists. Why? Because it’s a sexy, genre-bending masterpiece filled with mysticism and music, one that’s smart and full of characters who stick in your brain long after all the blood dries. Ryan Coogler’s experiment in vampire mythology is, at its heart, a survival story, and it touches on everything from cultural appropriation and the cyclical oppression of colonialism to faith, freedom, and the pursuit of power. It works on every level, but its characters are what we’re talking about after the fact — a cast brimming with unforgettable performances, each one shaping the story in ways that go far beyond plot. We ranked the key players, not by screen time or billing, but by who made the biggest impression, who was vital to the plot, and who we’ll be rooting for should awards season nominations come calling.

9 Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller)

Omar Benson Miller standing at a barn door wearing a straw hat and overalls in Sinners.

Cornbread is all brawn, loyalty, and accidental comedy, and Omar Benson Miller is so damn likable playing him that you almost forget this guy isn’t just a bad husband, he’s also pretty crappy at his job. He ditches his wife in the fields to play bouncer, only to spend most of the film scheming to break into the very club he’s supposed to be guarding, which says everything about competence. He’s terrifying in vampire form, clumsy and bumbling while human, but fun to watch regardless.

8 Grace Chow (Li Jun Li)

A woman looks down at a molitav cocktail in her hands in Sinners

Grace Chow might be everyone else’s most-hated character, but you won’t find her at the bottom of our list for one simple reason: she’s a mother. Sure, her choice to invite Remmick and his vampiric horde inside the juke joint was selfish and rash, but, in Grace’s mind, it guaranteed the safety of her daughter and the rest of the townsfolk. That moment sparked the biggest debate amongst fans, but that’s exactly why it works: Grace isn’t acting out of malice — she’s being pragmatic, cutting the vampire threat off at the source before it grows out of control. Her choices are brutal, decisive, and, within context, smart, crystallizing Sinners’ theme of survival under impossible conditions.

7 Pearline (Jayme Lawson)

Jayme Lawson as Pearline singing on the floor in Sinners

Sinners doesn’t really stop to admire what Jayme Lawson’s doing within its narrative, but it really doesn’t need to. There’s no way you can miss her Pearline – a woman longing for freedom and a life less prescribed. Lawson’s performance makes that desire feel tangible through her physicality and musical moments. She may not dominate the story like Annie or Mary, but her presence shapes Sammie’s journey and grounds the movie’s wildest sequences in real emotion.

6 Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo)

Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) has a worried look on his face in Sinners.

Delta Slim arrives pre-mythologized — a self-medicating blues legend carrying the weight of trauma and hard-earned wisdom — and only someone as storied and capable as Delroy Lindo could give him the weary charisma of someone who’s lived long enough to earn all that. He’s not super central to the plot, but he deepens the film’s musical lineage, grounding Sammie’s prodigal talent in world-weary experience and serving as the voice of reason and calm when the proverbial shit hits the fan.

5 Mary (Hailee Steinfeld)

Sinners' Hailee Steinfeld stands at a barn party, smiling seductively

Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary is the wild card of Coogler’s vampire lore — temptation with pointier teeth. Steinfeld leans into the character’s volatility, wounded pride, desire, and resentment over Stack’s choice to abandon her. There’s a bite to her from the very beginning that makes her transformation into a vampire feel almost inevitable. Mary’s tragedy isn’t just personal — it’s symbolic, a story about proximity to power and the cost of belonging. Her relationship with Stack is so doomed that when she crosses over, she doesn’t just damn herself; she decides his fate, too. That amount of influence, coupled with Steinfeld’s undeniable talent, makes Mary infinitely watchable.

4 Sammie (Miles Caton)

Sammie (Miles Caton) plays his guitar for a crowd in Sinners.

The movie tells you early that music can tear holes between worlds, but it’s Sammie who proves it. As the true conduit between past, present, and future, he’s the film’s mystical lynchpin — a young man whose talent summons spirits and blurs history. He might start out feeling like the kid everyone’s supposed to protect, but fairly quickly, the film reveals he’s the reason anyone’s in danger at all. Still, Miles Caton gives Sammie an easy, unforced sincerity that never tips too far into the saccharine. And that’s key, because it’s not just Sammie’s voice that’s powerful. His evolution — from naive blues player to a hardened, confident young man shaped by trauma but also fueled by it — is the bones this whole thing is built on.

3 Remmick (Jack O'Connell)

Remmick (Jack O'Connell) is the master vampire with a bloody grin in Sinners.

A villain who sings, dances, and weaponizes folk music was either going to be ridiculous or unforgettable. Somehow, Jack O’Connell makes him both. Remmick is a menace filtered through theatricality, an embodiment of cultural theft masquerading as communion. O’Connell plays him with a kind of gleeful commitment, recruiting a mini army of vampire minions and then breaking into a Riverdance step routine because, why not? Even with all the absurdity, you can sense the rage and cunning underneath the spectacle. It’s a performance that makes you laugh, squirm, and, weirdly, empathize with a guy who’s systematically terrorizing everyone else.

2 Smoke & Stack (Michael B. Jordan)

Michael B. Jordan as Smoke and Stack in Sinners

The Smokestack twins are the engine of Sinners, both war-scarred, driven by greed, and haunted in complementary ways. And Jordan uses that two-sided coin conceit to externalize a driving conflict. It’s restraint versus indulgence, survival versus sentimentality. Which is a weakness, and which wins out? Smoke’s story is heavier, weighed down by loss and structured with skepticism and a dogmatic discipline. Stack is smoother, floating by on charm and carefully constructed apathy while balancing on a hair trigger just seconds from being tripped. Fresh off years running with Chicago mobs, the brothers funnel stolen money into a Clarksdale juke joint, hoping the community can launder their sins, but their homecoming turns into a sort of reckoning. And Jordan’s performance never asks the audience to choose which twin is “better,” only to recognize how both are incomplete.

1 Annie (Wunmi Mosaku)

Wunmi Mosaku as Annie in Sinners looking at the camera with her hand on her hip

Michael B. Jordan may be literally splitting himself in two to channel the kind of charisma and animal magnetism it takes to power a vampire flick with Oscar ambitions, but make no mistake: Sinners belongs to Wunmi Mosaku. Her Hoodoo rootworker Annie is more than just a romantic roadblock for Smoke — she’s a desperately needed survival tool when the evening's boozy good times bleed into something darker and far more deadly. Armed with mojo bags, herbs, charms, haint-blue wash, and a deep ancestral fluency, Annie recognizes Remmick’s crew for what they are long before her peers, and that authoritative certainty is why everyone, especially the brothers in charge, defer to her. Mosaku plays Annie as both nurturing and murderous, steely, grounded, and sure of her own power, which means, even opposite Jordan at peak movie-star voltage, the actress (and her character) pulls focus.