Why Rick From The Guilty Sounds So Familiar
"The Guilty" is Netflix's latest white-knuckle crime drama that manages to be a gripping thriller with little more action than a guy talking on the phone. The film is a remake of a 2018 Danish film and stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Joe Baylor, an LAPD officer who's been pulled from active duty and assigned to a 911 call center during wildfire season while he awaits a court hearing for something that happened a few months prior. He gets an emergency call from a woman named Emily (Riley Keough), who says she's been abducted, but can't give details because she's in a van with her abductor.
Joe gets obsessed with finding and saving Emily, and starts making calls trying to rope other people into tracking her down. One of those people is Rick, his former partner, who's going to testify at the hearing. He convinces Rick to help him get more information, and what Rick tells him changes everything (the movie has twist after twist).
Rick is heard — but not seen — throughout the movie. His voice might sound familiar, though, and his face should ring a bell, as well. He's played by Eli Goree, a rising star who's had a handful of notable film and TV roles. Here's where you've seen him before.
Eli Goree was one of The 100
Eli Goree's breakout role was as Wells Jaha in the first three episodes of the CW's hit sci-fi survival thriller "The 100."
Wells is the son of Chancellor Thelonious Jaha (Isaiah Washington) and the best friend of Clarke (Eliza Taylor). He intentionally gets himself arrested to be part of the titular group of post-apocalyptic juvenile delinquents from a space station who get sent down to Earth's surface to explore it for habitability almost 100 years after nuclear armageddon. He's not a bad boy at all, though — he's joining the crew in order to keep an eye on Clarke.
At the start of the series, he's the group's moral compass, doing his best to keep the delinquents on the straight and narrow and helping out with whatever tasks were needed. Unfortunately, he is killed in the third episode by a young girl named Charlotte (Izabela Vidovic) in an act of revenge, because she blames his father, the Chancellor, for the deaths of her parents.
Eli Goree wasn't on "The 100" for very long, but he still managed to make a major impact as one of the show's first important deaths.
Eli Goree hit Riverdale hard
In 2018, Goree returned to the CW for a recurring role on the cult hit teen drama "Riverdale." He appeared throughout Seasons 3 and 4 as Munroe "Mad Dog" Moore, a friend of Archie's (KJ Apa).
When viewers first meet Mad Dog, he is the best boxer in the underground fight club at the Leopold and Loeb Juvenile Detention Center. When Archie gets incarcerated there, they become cellmates and friends, and Mad Dog eventually helps Archie escape from the youth prison. Archie returns the favor by blackmailing the governor into pardoning him. After getting out, he starts playing for the Riverdale High football team.
The punches Goree threw on "Riverdale" were real, he told The A.V. Club. "KJ, he's a rugby guy, so when we were doing our combinations, he's like, 'man, just hit me,'" Goree said. "And I'd be like 'You sure?' And he'd be like 'Yeah man, just hit me.' And I'd be like, 'All right, you can hit me too, just not too hard.'"
Eli Goree became a legend in One Night in Miami...
Goree returned to the boxing ring to play Cassius Clay in the 2020 historical drama "One Night in Miami...," which dramatized the night when Black leaders Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown, and Clay met in 1964 to discuss their lives and their ideas for the future. As Clay — the legendary athlete and activist who later changed his name to Muhammad Ali — Goree acted alongside Kingsley Ben-Adir, Aldis Hodge, and Leslie Odom Jr. The movie was nominated for three Academy Awards.
Goree told Esquire that people always told him he looked like a young Muhammad Ali, and he always hoped he could do something with the resemblance. It paid off. But the Canadian actor still had to work with a dialect coach to try to nail Ali's distinctive accent and put on extra 20 pounds of muscle to more closely approximate his physique. And playing Cassius Clay requires more convincing boxing ability than he needed on "Riverdale," so he worked out with a boxing trainer.