Nicholas Britell

Nicholas Britell is an American composer and pianist whose work moves between concert music and screen storytelling. Born in New York City in 1980, he studied at the Juilliard School’s pre-college division and later attended Harvard University, graduating in 2002. Before becoming widely known as a film composer, he performed and wrote music as a pianist; his background in classical repertoire remains audible in the carefully shaped keyboard writing that recurs across his scores.

His breakout collaboration with director Adam McKay was The Big Short (2015). For that film, Britell adapted and transformed ideas associated with baroque music, including Handel, to give the financial-crisis satire an ironic, unstable elegance. McKay again hired him for Vice (2018), and for Don’t Look Up (2021), whose score brought Britell an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score.

Britell’s partnership with Barry Jenkins produced two of his most celebrated scores. Moonlight (2016), adapted from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, follows Chiron through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood in Miami. Britell wrote its recurring piano theme, “The Middle of the World,” and manipulated orchestral sound in a style influenced by chopped-and-screwed hip-hop. The score earned him his first Oscar nomination for Best Original Score.

For Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), adapted from James Baldwin’s novel, Britell created a lush score centered on strings and piano. It earned him a second Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score.

On television, Britell composed the title theme and score for HBO’s Succession, created by Jesse Armstrong. The series tracks the Roy family’s struggle for control of media conglomerate Waystar Royco. Its ominous piano motif, punctuated by hip-hop-inflected rhythms, became inseparable from the show’s identity. Britell won the 2019 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music for Succession.

Beyond those projects, his credits include Battle of the Sexes (2017), The King (2019), Cruella (2021), and She Said (2022). He composed the music for Barry Jenkins’s 2021 Amazon limited series The Underground Railroad, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In 2023, he returned to the Roy world for Succession’s fourth and final season, shaping variations on its familiar musical material as the drama reached its conclusion.

Britell’s awards recognition spans the Oscars and television academies, but the distinctive feature of his career is the way individual scores are tailored to narrative perspective: Moonlight’s tenderness, Beale Street’s romantic ache, and Succession’s corrosive grandeur each receive markedly different musical languages. That range has defined his public profile.