Lewis Saunderson is a new kind of actor. We’ve never seen his like before, not really. In all his TIkTok videos, and now Youtube videos, he creates scenes of utmost emotional torment, his eyes red and weeping and his face a rictus or misery and shock. In this vid below, a man has broken his back and is sending a last video message to his wife who is also pregnant (Because this is a Lewis Saunderson video and it couldn’t just be his wife).

I honestly wonder what any passersby were thinking as he filmed it in the village stream.

But his canon is not just life and death situations. In the next vid a father confronts his son and finally says he doesn’t love the bastard. He’s obviously been pushed to the limit by a series of increasing misdeeds by his son, though we the viewer are not privy to what these misdeeds actually are.

He’s not afraid of a little sci-fi either. An astronaut yells at Houston Control that all his crew are dead and something is killing them.

His videos are a viral sensation on TikTok. Sure, there’s plenty cynical know-it-alls like you and me who watch them ironically and laugh at the disconnected bombast of these videos, others still who like to grin at bad acting (and there I have to disagree. I honestly think the jury is out as to whether Saunderson is a bad actor or not because we never see his acting on any gradient. If I showed you all the times Meryl Streep or Tom Hanks broke down in their movies and nothing else they too would look like bad actors).

But here’s the thing. There’s more, far more, who simply watch Saunderson for the unironic #emotional high.

Honestly, I think Mr Saunderson is ahead of the curve. The world moves faster now, attention spans are depleted and a whole movie is a heckuva investment. Why watch a whole film to get that powerful emotional scene when you can just watch the emotional scene? People are already shoving movie scenes on to video shorts with some moody music and absolutely no context. Lewis Saunderson just got rid of the movie bit and made his own.

Anyway, here’s a video of him waking up from a coma ten years later and discovering he’s killed his wife and child…