Aldis Hodge, born September 20, 1986, started acting as a child and spent his teenage years building a screen career. Television audiences came to know him as Alec Hardison, the hacker on the TNT series Leverage, a role that made his name with a wide audience. Film work kept broadening his range: he played MC Ren, a member of the rap group N.W.A, in the 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton, and Levi Jackson in the 2016 film Hidden Figures, the story of Black women mathematicians whose calculations helped launch Americans into orbit.
Between those projects, he played Noah, an escaped slave planning freedom, in the WGN America series Underground. He joined the Boston crime drama City on a Hill and took the role of Carter Hall in the superhero film Black Adam, appearances that put him in three very different storytelling worlds within a few years.
Making things runs alongside the acting. Hodge studied design as a teenager, took a course at ArtCenter that set him toward watchmaking, and works as a self-taught watch designer and painter, a second craft he has described as part of who he is rather than a hobby.
For Prime Video’s Cross, Hodge took the lead role of Alex Cross, the detective and forensic psychologist created in James Patterson’s novels. The television adaptation was developed under showrunner Ben Watkins. In a 2024 Television Academy interview, Hodge described being drawn to a script that gave the character a full life within his family and community.
He also spoke about why the perspectives of Black writers and creators mattered to him. He wanted the work to draw on lived experience, and he said that repeatedly explaining ordinary aspects of Black life on other productions had been difficult.
The series returned for a second season in 2025, with Cross pursuing a vigilante who targets corrupt billionaires. His screen work has also been recognized with a Screen Actors Guild Award.
