Please Rewind Talent Wall

Bokeem Woodbine

Bokeem Woodbine has built a screen career around range, moving between crime stories, comic-book films, science fiction and television drama without becoming tied to one kind of role. Born in Harlem on April 13, 1973, he attended the Dalton School before transferring to Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. Woodbine made his television acting debut in the CBS Schoolbreak Special “Love Off Limits.” Casting director Jaki Brown-Karman noticed the appearance and later recommended him to Forest Whitaker for the HBO television movie Strapped. That early work led into films from several major Black filmmakers of the 1990s, including Spike Lee’s Crooklyn, Mario Van Peebles’s Panther and the Hughes Brothers’ Dead Presidents. He also reunited with Tupac Shakur in Vondie Curtis-Hall’s Gridlock’d after appearing in the rapper’s music video for “I Ain’t Mad at Cha.” His television work has been equally varied. Woodbine played gangster rapper Massive Genius in an episode of The Sopranos, appeared as Dr. Damon Bradley in City of Angels and joined Saving Grace as death-row inmate Leon Cooley. His performance as Damon Bradley earned an NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. Woodbine later portrayed saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman in Ray and appeared in Black Dynamite, Devil, Total Recall and Riddick. One of his most notable television roles came as Mike Milligan in Fargo, which brought him nominations for both a Critics’ Choice Television Award and a Primetime Emmy Award. He continued moving comfortably across genres as Shocker in Spider-Man: Homecoming, task-force member Daryn Dupree in Unsolved and Sheriff Domingo in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Across film and television, Woodbine’s career has been shaped less by a single defining lane than by his ability to fit convincingly into very different worlds.