Mamoudou Athie’s next act – The Essence

Even though his face is already quite well-known, Mamoudou Athie is one step away from becoming a household name.

The Mauritania-born, New Carrolton, MD-raised actor has remained a fixture in high-profile projects since graduating from the Yale School of Drama in 2014. Even in case you don’t know his name yet, you’ve actually seen his work. Whether it’s as Grandmaster Flash in Netflix’s too-soon-dead hip-hop musical, as protagonist Elijah in Prentice Penny’s hit sommelier drama, as Wade Ripple in Disney’s , or as Ramsay Cole within the hit sequel.

“I’m incredibly lucky,” Athie says of his success on this field so soon after launching his acting profession. The classically trained actor, who also got his start on the William Esper Studio in Manhattan, acknowledges that his rapid rise to success was a mixture of exertions, timing and the collaborative efforts of many black actors who got here before him, breaking through established boundaries, stereotypes, industry discrimination and typecasting.

“I graduated in 2014 when the business was kind of taking off. I always think about all the actors of color who have been denied opportunities over the years, since the industry started,” he says. “A lot of people have done a lot of work so that I could have a fair chance at something. [like this]“Which is the real damage.”

The actor, who has already worked with stars like Jamie Foxx within the 2023 film, Neicy Nash and Courtney B. Vance in 2020, and Phylicia Rashad in 2020, also notes that his personal motivations pushed him to concentrate on auditioning for unconventional roles after graduating.

“The student loans were a huge motivator,” he laughs. “A lot of the roles you saw me in, I won’t say they didn’t exist, but I certainly wasn’t the first choice for a lot of those roles.”

You’ll rarely see Athi playing “type” in his roles. Unlike most young black actors starting out, he never needed to don an orange jumpsuit or stand in a police line. He didn’t play a T-shirt-wearing street drug dealer doomed to linger on the corner with few options and even less ambition. Instead, he was a very sensitive Brooklynite who found himself in barely absurd situations while attempting to deny his behavior on FXX, which earned him a Primetime Emmy nomination. He was an area alt-punk graveyard dweller who dreamed of a profession in hard rock recording in 2017. He was a gifted archivist who delved too deeply into an occult mystery long buried in lost footage in Netflix’s too-soon-canceled horror thriller, .

Athie often lands not only projects that tell queer stories, but additionally roles that aren’t necessarily written for a black man to fill. Yet he makes each character distinctly his own—to the purpose where viewers could never imagine anyone else filling those shoes.

“I want to be able to do whatever I want,” Athie said of being consistently solid in roles as people of color. “I went to all of these schools for a reason. Just like anyone else, we’ve earned the right to play things that are outside of our [perceived] life experience. And we can do it as well as or better than anyone else.”

His latest project, , is true to expectations, the most recent absurdist black comedy anthology directed by acclaimed contemporary surrealist, Yorgos Lanthimos.

“He could be a genius,” Athie says of Lanthimos, whose last film, released in 2023, earned 11 Oscar nominations and 4 wins.

“This guy is just so confident and unwavering in his vision of something,” the actor says of his excitement about working on the film. He says that despite not fully understanding the story — under no circumstances shocking given Lanthimos’ dystopian fantasy scenario, which the director famously never talks about — he was committed to growing as an actor and fully immersed himself within the exploration of the film.

“I saw this guy create something so unique and vivid and specific and full and terrifying. It just makes you excited when you see something so refreshingly unique and thoughtful.”

Athie takes on multiple roles within the film, which he says has pushed him to grow as an actor.

The film, which explores themes of control, sacrifice and desperation for acceptance, features wild plot lines and even wilder imagery – the whole lot from wound-licking to fatal self-harm and group sex – each delivered with a healthy dose of dark humor. The latter of those wild images involved Athi, demanding a level of enthusiasm for the role and trust within the director’s vision that he hadn’t tackled before.

“As an actor, you give up a lot of control from the filmmaker—your image, who you are, what you do—there’s a lot of things you don’t have control over. You want to do it with someone you can rely on,” he says. “And the scene isn’t a big deal. When I was shooting it, I was like, ‘Oh, man, what’s this going to look like?’ But then you see it and you’re like, ‘Oh, okay.’”

As he steadily took his acting to latest heights, Athie never overlooked the moment that showed him that this was the trail he would follow for the long haul.

“I did a play called when I was in my third year of graduate school, and it was really important to me,” he reveals. “It was basically about people and greed and money, and it was about humanity in a way that I found really intensely moving and deeply personal.”

“I remember going to Yale Hospital for a checkup and this lady stopped me. And the way she talked about how much art had affected her made me realize that this was a really worthwhile career.”

For Mamadou Athie, moments like this, which he has also experienced while working on projects similar to and , remind him what it’s all about.

“When you feel like there’s something that’s really at stake, that something’s really been said, that something’s really been explored about humanity, or that something can change someone’s mind about something, or open up someone’s perspective, or help someone feel better about something in their own life, you feel like it’s inevitably useful in a way that’s just so fulfilling.”

“Something about that moment made me think, ‘I can do this until I’m 80.'”