Rise to Fame
He was in his mid-forties and seriously thinking about calling it quits when a self-tape for a zombie spinoff changed the math. He almost skipped the Fear the Walking Dead audition entirely. A stage actor with a Tony nomination, he had no interest in 'some TV thing.' But he sent the tape, got an offer days later, and spent the next eight seasons as Victor Strand, the only cast member to appear in every season of the entire run. That one role bought him back into the industry at the exact moment he'd written himself out of it.
In the Spotlight
Two consecutive Best Actor Oscar nominations made him the first actor to do so back-to-back since Denzel Washington. The first Afro-Latino ever nominated in the Best Actor category, he got there twice over with Rustin and Sing Sing. Time magazine put him on the 100 Most Influential list in 2024. The Emmy for Euphoria in 2022 was the signal, but the Oscar run is the confirmation: he spent two decades as a working-class stage actor and then, past fifty, became the kind of actor who gets compared to Denzel.
Side Notes
He found his husband Raul on a Craigslist 'Missed Connections' post after they spotted each other in a Walgreens parking lot and neither spoke. They married in 2014 with 25 guests and have co-produced films together ever since. He also went to high school with Will Smith at Overbrook High in Philadelphia, which rarely comes up. Before any of that, he bartended for close to fifteen years while grinding theater, and studied journalism at Temple before deciding acting was the better story to tell.