Angus Cloud’s Second Final Last Is Now on Netflix and It’s His Best

As the world continues to mourn the loss of talented actor Angus Cloudat the age of 25, fans can and should watch his penultimate performance in Your Lucky Day on Netflix. Written and directed by Dan Brown, Your Lucky Day is a taut crime thriller that follows Sterling (Cloud), a wayward drug dealer who seizes the opportunity of a lifetime upon entering a convenience store. When a wealthy man wins the Mega-Ball jackpot of $156 million, Sterling holds up the winner, takes the ticket, and works with the store owner and a married couple trapped inside to clean up the crime scene and split the money.

Your Lucky Day has drawn praise for its gritty intensity, suspenseful action, and Cloud’s commanding performance that exudes authenticity and a multi-layered depth. While Cloud is best known for his character Fezco in HBO’s hit drama Euphoria,Your Lucky Day marks the late actor’s second to last movie performance ahead of the upcoming horror movie Abigail. With heartfelt pathos that makes his character easy to root for despite his criminal behavior, Cloud’s towering turn in Your Lucky Day is arguably the best movie performance in a career cut far too short.

What is Your Lucky Day About?

Your Lucky Day is a small, intimate crime thriller that mostly takes place inside a convenience store. A young hard-luck drug dealer named Sterling enters a liquor store, where a married and pregnant couple named Ana Marlene (Jessica Garza) and Abraham (Elliot Knight) are present along with the clerk, Amir (Mousa Hussein Kraish). A rude, wealthy customer named George Laird enters with several lottery tickets and begins checking them for winners. One ticket bears matching numbers to the Mega-Ball jackpot, which stands to pay out $156 million to the lucky winner.

Thinking quickly, Sterling dons a makeshift mask and holds George up for the winning lottery ticket with a revolver. A young cop (Sterling Beaumon) in the bathroom overhears the commotion and confronts Sterling, resulting in a bloodbath and two dead bodies. Rather than killing the rest of the patrons and making off with the ticket alone, Sterling realizes he needs their help to get away with the crime and cash out the lottery ticket.

Upon agreeing to give Amir, Ana Marlene, and Abraham a cut of the winnings for disposing of the dead bodies and corroborating a made-up story to the police, Sterling showcases an unpredictable depth of character as the story ultimately veers from his perspective to Ana Marelene’s.

Cloud Embodies a Layered Antihero Character

On the surface, Sterling is little more than a two-bit hood with no redeeming value. He speaks with a slow drawl that indicates his supposed lack of intelligence, appears like a teenage criminal adorned with tattoos, and brandishes a firearm to steal a lottery ticket to enrich himself. When the acclaimed crime thriller begins, Sterling is noticeably unlikable and unworthy of rooting for him.

However, as the story unfolds, Cloud’s performance reveals a layered depth of humanity and genuine authenticity that gives Sterling a 180-degree turnaround. As a street-wise criminal with an underdog spirit, Sterling is much smarter than he lets on and has a much bigger heart than one might expect from a drug-pushing stick-up man.

One of Sterling’s first major character turns comes when he forces Amir and the married couple into the back store room to delete the surveillance camera footage that recorded the central crime. Rather than acting like a cold-blooded killer, Sterling states that he has no intention of murdering anyone and that the officer he shot in the store was out of self-defense. While it’s easy to dismiss this as an act of self-preservation, Sterling continues to open up and share his vulnerabilities with others.

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More surprising yet, Sterling begins asking the hostages about their personal lives and what makes them tick, doing so with honest intrigue and a genuine interest in their well-being. This leads to Sterling forming a partnership with Amir, Ana Marlene, and Abraham to eliminate the evidence from the crime scene and split the lottery winnings. Sterling is wise enough to know he cannot get away with the crime without the help of those he has endangered, yet he is still firm enough to discipline them if they betray him. The way Cloud transitions from a one-dimensional criminal to a three-dimensional antihero underscores the late actors’ depth of range and makes the character far more sympathetic than before.

A Perfectly Balanced Performance

Another pivotal scene in the gritty American crime thriller that spotlights Sterling’s unlikely turn involves asking Ana Marlene about her previous line of work. Ana Marlene reveals that she had few options but to undergo a sleazy bribery scheme with a dentist to become his assistant. Sterling not only sympathizes with Ana Marlene’s plight, but together, the two characters typify the aching, unattainable goal of the American Dream that functions as a grand illusion for many U.S. citizens.

By the middle of the movie, viewers find themselves no longer despising Sterling and what he stands for, but rooting for him to get away with the crime thanks to the humanity he begins to expose. Part of this has to do with how unlikable the victims are — a mean, wealthy, entitled white man and a nepotistic cop with little experience — but the result is just the same. Deep down, viewers can sense that Sterling does not want to harm anyone, and Cloud strikes a pitch-perfect balance between being vulnerable and unpredictably terrifying at once.

There’s an intimating danger to Cloud’s performance as a tortured and haunted soul who lacks agency and salvation that’s girded by a glimmer of hope, which goes a long way in caring about Sterling from beginning to end. While Garza’s performance as Ana Marlene is also strong, once Cloud’s character leaves the story, the American heist movie tends to get worse by falling into several tired tropes and crime-thriller trappings viewers have seen before. Moreover, once Sterling departs, the rooting interest in the survivors decreases and his character remains in viewers’ minds the whole time.

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Above all else, there’s an undeniable realness to Cloud’s character that never exudes a false moment or phony note in Your Lucky Day. By all accounts, Cloud was just as real in his off-stage life, and it’s the honesty and authenticity most people will recognize him for most. In his outstanding portrayal of Sterling, Cloud channeled his authentic nature to play a character much deeper below the surface than when he first appeared. Between the underdog spirit he exudes and the unpredictable balance of openhearted humanity and dangerous criminality, Cloud’s performance soars to the heavens indeed.