Corey Hawkins

Corey Antonio Hawkins, born October 22, 1988, in Washington, D.C., is an American actor whose work spans theater, film, and television. Raised by his mother, a police officer, Hawkins attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts before enrolling in the Juilliard School in New York City, where he graduated as a member of the drama division's Group 40. During his time at Juilliard, he received the John Houseman Award for excellence in classical theatre.

Hawkins made his Broadway debut in 2013 as Tybalt in a revival of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, appearing alongside Orlando Bloom and Geoffrey Owens. He returned to Broadway in the spring of 2017 for a limited engagement in Six Degrees of Separation, opposite Allison Janney and John Benjamin Hickey, a performance that earned him his first Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play. His second Tony nomination in the same category came in 2022 for his starring role in Topdog/Underdog.

His screen career gained significant momentum in 2015, when he portrayed Dr. Dre in the Universal Pictures biopic Straight Outta Compton, a film that grossed $201 million at the box office and earned Hawkins a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. That same year, he joined the cast of AMC's The Walking Dead as Heath, a character drawn from Robert Kirkman's comic series, a role he held through 2016. In 2017, Hawkins took on the lead in the Fox series 24: Legacy and co-starred in Kong: Skull Island alongside Brie Larson, Tom Hiddleston, and Samuel L. Jackson. Also that year, he performed "God Bless America" at the men's singles final of the U.S. Open.

Hawkins appeared in Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman in 2018, which brought him a second Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. He received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for his portrayal of Paul in the Quibi series Survive in 2020. Subsequent film credits include 6 Underground, Jon M. Chu's In the Heights, Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth, and the 2023 film adaptation of The Color Purple. Earlier in his career, he appeared in Iron Man 3 and the action-thriller Non-Stop, opposite Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore. In January 2024, it was announced that Hawkins would replace Jonathan Majors in The Man in My Basement.