Though he’s already quite a familiar face, Mamoudou Athie is just on the precipice of becoming a household name.
The Mauritania-born, New Carrolton, MD-raised actor has remained heavily booked in high-profile projects since just shortly after graduating from Yale School of Drama in 2014. Even if you don’t yet know his name off the top of your head, you’ve certainly seen his work. Whether as Grandmaster Flash in Netflix’s gone-too-soon Hip-Hop musical The Get Down, as protagonist Elijah in Prentice Penny’s hit sommelier drama Uncorked, as Wade Ripple in Disney’s Elemental, or in his turn as Ramsay Cole in the blockbuster sequel Jurassic World Dominion.
“I’m extremely fortunate,” Athie says of his success in the field so soon after entering professional acting. The classically-trained actor, who also cut his teeth at Manhattan’s William Esper Studio, recognizes that his quick rise to success came from a combination of hard work, timing, and the combined efforts of many Black actors who came before him chipping away at pre-established boundaries, stereotypes, and industry discrimination, and typecasting.
“I graduated in 2014 when business was booming in a way. I always think about all the actors of color that were denied opportunity for years, since the beginning of the industry’s existence,” he says. “A lot of people did a lot of work for me to be in a position just to have a fair shot at something [like this], which is a real shame.”
The actor, who has already worked alongside some of those greats like Jamie Foxx in 2023’s The Burial, Neicy Nash and Courtney B. Vance in 2020’s Uncorked, and Phylicia Rashad in 2020’s Black Box, also notes that his personal drive pushed him to laser-focus on auditioning often and hard for out-of-the-box roles after completing his studies.
“Student loans were this huge motivator,” he laughs. “A lot of the roles that you’ve seen me play, I’m not going to say they didn’t entirely exist, but certainly I wasn’t necessarily the first choice for a lot of those kinds of parts.”
You’ll rarely see Athie playing “to type” in his roles. Unlike most young Black actors getting their start, he’s never had to don an orange jumpsuit or stand in a police lineup. He hasn’t played the undershirt-clad street pharmaceutical dealer, doomed to remain on the corner due to few options and even less ambition. Instead, he’s been the too-sensitive Brooklynite finding himself in somewhat absurd situations while trying to deny his demeanor in FXX’s Oh Jerome, No, which earned him a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. He’s been the local alt-punk cemetery-dweller harboring dreams of a hard rock recording career in 2017’s Patti Cake$. He’s been the skilled archivist digging a bit too deeply into an occult secret long buried in lost footage in Netflix’s too-quickly-canceled mystery horror thriller, Archive 81.
Often, Athie lands not only projects telling off-kilter stories but roles that are not necessarily written to be filled by a Black man. However, he makes each character distinctly his own – to a point where viewers could never picture anyone else filling said shoes.
“I want to be able to do everything that I want to do,” Athie said of consistently being cast across apparent color lines. “I went to all these schools for a reason. Just like anyone else, we have earned the right to play things that are outside of our [perceived] lived experience. And we can do it just as good or better as anyone else.”
True to form is his latest project, Kinds of Kindness, the latest absurdist black comedy anthology film from decorated modern surrealist director Yorgos Lanthimos.
“He might be a genius,” Athie says of Lanthimos, whose most recent film 2023’s Poor Things earned 11 Academy Award nominations and 4 wins.
“The guy is just so secure and steadfast in his vision of something,” the actor says of his excitement to work on the film. He says despite not fully understanding the full story at hand – not at all a shock for a dystopian fantasy Lanthimos script, which the director famously never expounds upon – he was dedicated to pushing himself as an actor and giving himself fully to the exploration on film.
“I saw this guy making something that was so unique, and alive, and specific, and full, and scary. It just makes you excited when you see something that’s just so refreshingly unique and thoughtful.”
Athie portrays multiple roles in the film, an experience he says pushed him to grow up as an actor.
The film, which deals with themes of control, self-sacrifice, and desperation for acceptance, features wild plotlines and even wilder imagery – everything from wound-licking to fatal self-mutilation to group sex – each delivered with a healthy dose of dark humor. The latter of those wild images involved Athie, requiring a level of enthusiasm for the role and trust in the director’s vision he hadn’t quite broached before.
“As an actor, you are divesting a certain amount of control to the filmmaker – your image, who you are, and what you’re doing – there’s a lot of things that are outside of your control. You want to do it with somebody who you can count on,” he says. “Also, that scene is not that big a deal. Filming it, it was like, ‘Oh man, what’s this going to be like?’ But then you see it, it’s like, ‘Oh, all right.'”
As he steadily takes his acting to new heights, Athie has not lost sight of the moment that showed him this path was the one he’d stick with for the long term.
“I did this play called The Visit, while in my third year of grad school, and it was so deeply 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 I went for a checkup at the Yale Hospital, and this lady stopped me, and the way she was talking about how this play deeply affected her, I realized this was actually a useful career.”
For Mamadou Athie, moments like this one, which he says he has also experienced from projects like Elemental and Uncorked remind him what it’s all about.
“When it feels like there’s something that’s actually at stake, there’s something that’s actually being said, something that’s actually being explored about humanity, or maybe something that can change somebody’s mind on something, or open up somebody’s point of view, or help them feel better about a situation in their own life, it feels imminently useful in a way that’s just so fulfilling.”
“Something about the moment made me think, ‘I can do this until I’m 80.'”