Young talent Stephan James quickly earned a spot in Hollywood's must-have list. Check out some of the Canadian born actor's best roles that you do not want to miss.
Stephan James: His Most Powerful Movie and TV Show Roles
Stephan James comes from a dedicated and tight-knit Canadian Jamaican family who supported him early on when he began acting. As a teen, he starred in the hit series Degrassi, How to Be Indie, and a few small made for TV films before he made his serious debut as Jamaican deportee in Home Again.
James was the breakout star earning multiple award nominations including Best Supporting Actor at the Canadian Screen Awards. He then landed a role in critically acclaimed Ava DuVernay's Selma where he portrayed civil rights activist John Lewis. The Martin Luther King Jr. biopic earned a Best Picture Nomination at the Oscars.
The handsome actor with a heartbeat-inducing smile was asked about Selma's Oscar "snub" by The Globe and Mail to which he responded "To me, I’ve always seen this film as a victory really, even before I saw the finished version. No award can amount to the way I feel about what we’ve done with this film. We’ve done something so relevant to our youth."
Stephan then starred as "Cummings Shakspear" in The Book of Negroes about slave resettlement after the American Revolutionary war. Because of his hard work in this series, he was nominated as one of the biggest "Rising Stars" at the Toronto International Film Festival and named one of the CBC's "6 Black Canadian Culture-Makers."
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He then went on to star as Black icon and history maker Jesse Owens in the biopic Race. James rightfully earned the Canadian Screen Award for Best Actor. Stephan has now been delicately selecting the works he participates in and portrayed Department of Justice Prosecutor "Preston Terry" in Shots Fired and in the James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk as star "Alonzo 'Fonny' Hunt". The heartwrenching romance film was nominated for many Academy Awards for his and Kiki Layne's work.
Stephan now stars in the powerful Amazon series Homecoming about military PTSD and corruption starring alongside Julia Roberts. He told The Hollywood Reporter during a roundtable with Hugh Grant and Diego Luna "It's a responsibility that we have as artists to be responsible for the work that we're putting out into the world. For me, it meant a lot that this character in Homecoming that didn't say African American in the breakdown. It could have very well said caucasian."
His intense portrayal earned him a Golden Globe nomination. Most recently he starred with the late great Chadwick Boseman in 21 Bridges and #FreeRayShawn with Laurence Fishburne and Skeet Ulrich where he portrayed Iraqi War veteran "Rayshawn Morris".
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Whatever Stephan James has his hands on, translates on-screen as a piece of art, so his work is a must-see!
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