Boris Kodjoe

Boris Frederic Cecil Tay-Natey Ofuatey-Kodjoe was born on March 8, 1973, in Vienna, Austria, to Ursula, a German psychologist of Jewish descent, and Eric Kodjoe, a Ga-Dangme Ghanaian physician. His parents divorced when he was six years old, after which he relocated to Germany and grew up in Gundelfingen, near Freiburg im Breisgau. His full name pays homage to the Russian poet and writer Boris Pasternak. His matrilineal great-grandmother was Jewish and was killed in the Holocaust, while his maternal grandmother survived the war in hiding. His brother Patrick Kodjoe played basketball at Virginia Commonwealth University, where Boris himself attended on a tennis scholarship, graduating with a bachelor's degree in marketing in 1996. A four-year letterman on the Rams' men's tennis team, Kodjoe ranks ninth in school history with 75 career singles wins and is tied for third in doubles victories with 66, having partnered with Jonas Elmblad on 37 of those matches. A back injury ended his tennis career, leading him to modeling and, subsequently, acting. In 1995, he appeared in TLC's music video for "Red Light Special."

Kodjoe's professional acting breakthrough came with the Showtime drama series Soul Food, in which he played sports-courier agent Damon Carter from 2000 to 2004. That same year he debuted on the series, he also appeared in the film Love & Basketball. He went on to appear in Brown Sugar in 2002, the same year People magazine named him one of the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World." He played David Taylor, the wayward son of Pastor Fred Taylor, in the October 2005 film The Gospel, and performed in a stage production called Whatever She Wants, starring Vivica A. Fox. He also made an appearance on the fifth season of Nip/Tuck. In 2008, Kodjoe appeared on Broadway in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The following year, he took a supporting role in the science fiction film Surrogates.

Kodjoe starred alongside Gugu Mbatha-Raw in the NBC series Undercovers, a J. J. Abrams-produced show in which they played a husband-and-wife secret agent team; the series lasted less than one season in 2010. That same year, he appeared as Luther in Resident Evil: Afterlife, a role he reprised in the 2012 sequel Resident Evil: Retribution. He had a guest appearance on Franklin & Bash in 2012. From 2013 to 2016, he starred as a fictionalized version of himself in the BET comedy parody series Real Husbands of Hollywood. In 2014, he was cast as a series regular on the ABC primetime soap opera Members Only, created by Susannah Grant, though the show never aired. Beginning in 2015, he took on a recurring guest role on Fox's The Last Man on Earth. Kodjoe was part of the ensemble cast for all three seasons of the CBS medical drama Code Black, playing surgeon Dr. Will Campbell from 2016 to 2018. In July 2018, he joined the Grey's Anatomy spin-off Station 19 in a recurring capacity, and was promoted to series regular in October of that year as fire captain Robert Sullivan, a character later elevated to Battalion Chief. He also provided voice work in the 2017 animated film Ferdinand.

Kodjoe is a two-time NAACP Image Award nominee, receiving nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for Soul Food and Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for Real Husbands of Hollywood. On May 21, 2005, he married his Soul Food co-star Nicole Ari Parker in Gundelfingen, Germany. The couple's first child, Sophia, was born in March 2005 and was diagnosed with spina bifida at birth. Their second child, a son, was born in October 2006. Kodjoe and Parker are members of Cascade United Methodist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, and the family resides in Los Angeles, California. In February 2019, the couple competed against each other on an episode of Lip Sync Battle.