André Holland, born December 28, 1979, in Bessemer, Alabama, grew up around Birmingham and trained as an actor in New York University’s graduate program, with additional study in London. His theatre work began paying off early: his Broadway debut came in the Tony Award-winning 2009 revival of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and he later joined the Broadway company of Wilson’s Jitney, a production that took the 2017 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. He has also performed in several Shakespeare in the Park productions.
In the film 42, he played sportswriter Wendell Smith alongside Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson. His television work includes The Knick, Steven Soderbergh’s series about a turn-of-the-century hospital, and his film work includes Selma.
Holland played the adult Kevin in Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins and inspired by Tarell McCraney’s play. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Kevin’s reunion with the film’s central character became one of its most discussed scenes. In a 2016 Esquire interview, he described seeking roles that resonated with his experience and spoke to contemporary life. Discussing Kevin, he emphasized the character’s effort to drop a rigid performance of masculinity and repair a relationship.
More recent work has kept him in leading roles with historical weight: he starred in Steven Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird, a drama about a basketball agent working through an N.B.A. lockout, and in The Big Cigar, a series about the Black Panther Party, where reviewers highlighted the fear, anger and tenderness he brought to the part.
