Jackson State

Tramell Tillman's Making History.

JSU alumnus Tramell Tillman won the Emmy and the Critics' Choice Award for *Severance*, then landed a role in Marvel's *Spider-Man: Brand New Day*. Here's what his run means for Jackson State, MADDRAMA, and Mississippi.

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08 Apr 2026 — 5 min read

Richard Phibbs for Variety

By Views from the Sip Editorial

In September 2025, Tramell Tillman walked onto the stage at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles and made history. He became the first Black man to win Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series — the only acting category in the Emmys' 77-year history that had not previously honored a Black performer.

In his acceptance speech, he saluted the Black actors who came before him. "I've been taken by their work for years and I've borrowed from them, so I'm just honored to be in the class," he said, naming the late Andre Braugher and Michael K. Williams.

In January 2026, he won Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series at the Critics' Choice Awards for the same role — Seth Milchick on Apple TV+'s Severance. He picked up his first Golden Globe nomination along the way. The Associated Press named him one of its Breakthrough Entertainers of 2025.

In March 2026, Marvel and Sony confirmed he had been cast in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the latest installment of the Tom Holland-fronted Spider-Man franchise, opening in theaters July 31, 2026. Tillman will play William Metzger — the leader of the Department of Damage Control — alongside a cast that includes Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, and Mark Ruffalo.

That is the kind of run an actor gets once in a career, if at all. And he is having it as a 2008 Jackson State University alumnus, summa cum laude, in mass communications.

The JSU connection

Tillman was born in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1985, and raised in Largo, Maryland — Prince George's County. He was a 2003 graduate of Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt. His path to Jackson State was a transfer story: he initially enrolled at Xavier University of Louisiana intending to pursue medicine. After Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, his parents urged him to transfer to Jackson State. He did. He switched his major from pre-med to mass communications. He found acting through JSU's MADDRAMA Performance Troupe, founded by Dr. Mark Henderson, current interim chair of the JSU Department of Speech Communication and Theatre.

Tillman graduated from JSU in 2008. He went on to the University of Tennessee for an MFA in acting, where he became the first Black man to complete that program.

JSU has, in the years since his Emmy win, embraced him as one of its own — and Tillman has consistently returned the embrace publicly. "I graduated from Jackson State University, and their band is the Sonic Boom of the South, the best marching band in the entire world," he told TV Guide in March 2025, in the context of the Severance season 2 finale's marching-band sequence at Lumon Industries. "This was an opportunity to highlight my culture, to highlight the significance of HBCUs — the marching bands, the showmanship, the pageantry, the discipline, the excellence, the Black joy."

A Black actor talking about Black joy in the context of an Apple TV+ drama set inside a fictional dystopian corporation is the kind of cultural moment that the marketing department typically does not anticipate. That it happened — and resonated — is part of why Tillman's career has hit at the velocity it has.

What this means for JSU and Jackson

Two things, both worth marking.

First, JSU has, in the past three years, watched its profile in popular culture shift. The Deion Sanders football era is now historical; the post-Sanders era has been one of building stability under interim and now permanent leadership. In that environment, having a Sonic Boom-shouting Emmy and Critics' Choice winner who explicitly credits MADDRAMA, the Department of Speech Communication and Theatre, and the broader JSU experience as foundational to his work is genuinely meaningful. It changes what current and prospective JSU students see as possible.

Callie Calicut, a JSU multimedia journalism senior who will attend the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles after graduating in May 2026, told the JSU newsroom Tillman's arc has motivated her directly. "This motivates me because it reminds me that I'm exactly where I need to be and in proximity to the people who I need to be in proximity to," she said. "It also showed me that you can pursue your dreams regardless of your major or what you study."

Second, Jackson — a city that loses cultural-export wins to Memphis, Atlanta, and Houston with predictable regularity — gets to claim Tillman in a way the city has not claimed an actor at this level in a long time. He is not from Jackson originally, but he was made, professionally, at Jackson State. That distinction matters. Jackson is a place that produces talent. The places that talent gets produced should be celebrated.

What's next

Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens July 31. Severance season 3 is filming. Tillman is, by every observable measure, in the part of his career where the offers come faster than he can process them.

What we'd like to see, alongside the franchise work, is a return — at some point — to JSU's campus. Not a one-off recruitment-style visit. A residency. A masterclass. A multi-day engagement with current MADDRAMA students, current Department of Speech Communication and Theatre students, current journalism students. The kind of structured commitment that turns a successful alumnus into a sustained pipeline for the next generation.

Tillman has said, repeatedly, that JSU shaped him. The most generative version of that statement is one where his shaping translates into the shaping of others. We'll be watching for that.

In the meantime: Jackson State produced an Emmy winner, a Critics' Choice winner, a Marvel franchise actor, and one of the most celebrated supporting performances on television. The Sonic Boom is, indeed, the best marching band in the entire world. And Tramell Tillman is having the year of his life.

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