A kid from a squat with no electricity turned a stoop audition into a career that keeps finding new franchises to anchor.
At a glance
- Known for
- Ahsoka Tano in Star Wars, Claire Temple in Marvel's Daredevil, Mimi in Rent
- Before fame
- Grew up in a squatter's apartment on the Lower East Side with no running water or heat
- Off-screen
- Co-founded Voto Latino and a CFDA award-winning fashion brand producing artisan clothing in Ghana
Rise to Fame
A 15-year-old sitting on a stoop in the Lower East Side. That's how Larry Clark and Harmony Korine found her, and that's how she ended up in Kids, the NC-17 controversy that doubled as a casting call for the next decade of independent film. She'd grown up in a squat her family moved into when she was six, an abandoned building where her mother and stepfather installed the plumbing themselves.
Spike Lee cast her opposite Denzel Washington in He Got Game three years later, which turned a one-off discovery story into an actual career. By the mid-2000s she was rotating through the Rolodexes of Rodriguez, Tarantino, and Kevin Smith. The Rent casting made particular sense: she'd lived the Lower East Side conditions the musical romanticizes, except hers didn't come with a soundtrack.
In the Spotlight
The Ahsoka Tano casting might be the most successful fan-tweet in entertainment history. In 2017, a fan asked if she'd play the character. She replied "Ummmm... yes please?!" Someone at Lucasfilm forwarded it to Dave Filoni. Three years later she debuted in The Mandalorian, and by 2023 she was headlining her own Star Wars series.
She's built a career out of being connective tissue. In the Marvel-Netflix universe, her Claire Temple stitched together Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and The Defenders. Now she's doing the same thing across the Star Wars franchise. In between, she played a DEA agent in Dopesick, which pulled 14 Emmy nominations and had nothing to do with space or superheroes.
Side Notes
The squat on the Lower East Side wasn't just backstory for audition small talk. She watched crack addiction and police raids in Tompkins Square Park from her apartment window, and it turned her into the kind of person who co-founds a voter registration nonprofit at 25. Voto Latino has been running since 2004, targeting young Latinx civic engagement long before that became a mainstream political strategy.
Studio 189, which she co-founded, produces artisan clothing in Ghana using traditional batik and kente techniques. It won the CFDA + Lexus Fashion Initiative for Sustainability in 2018. TIME put her on the TIME100 Climate list in 2024. She co-wrote a comic book series and lent her likeness to the main character, because apparently acting in everything wasn't enough.