Grantham Coleman

Grantham Coleman is an American actor who trained at The Juilliard School, where he completed his drama studies in 2011. His career has spanned stage, television, and film, with Broadway appearances between 2019 and 2022.

Coleman's professional stage work began in 2012 with a production of Romeo and Juliet at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where he played the title role. That same year he took a supporting part in a Daniel J. Sullivan-directed staging of As You Like It at the Delacorte Theater during Shakespeare in the Park, and appeared in Jackie Sibblies Drury's We Are Proud To Present... at the Soho Repertory Theatre. In 2013, he originated the role of Anthony Justin James in Tarell Alvin McCraney's Choir Boy in an off-Broadway production at the Manhattan Theatre Club, a role he later reprised at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. Also that year, he appeared opposite Rutina Wesley in Charles Fuller's two-hander One Night... at the Cherry Lane Theater. Anne Kauffman's 2015 production of Buzzer at The Public Theater in New York added another credit to his growing stage résumé.

A significant milestone came in 2017 when Coleman took on the title role in Hamlet at the Old Globe, directed by Barry Edelstein. He returned to the Old Globe's work the following year, playing Ferdinand in a joint production of The Tempest between that theater and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. In 2021, Edelstein reassembled the cast to perform the Hamlet production for radio.

Coleman's Broadway career began in 2019 when he played Martin Luther King Jr. in Robert Schenkkan's The Great Society at a Broadway theater alongside Brian Cox, earning an Antonyo Award nomination for the performance. That same year he appeared as Benedick in an all-Black cast production of Much Ado About Nothing during Shakespeare in the Park in New York, one performance of which was broadcast on PBS as part of the Great Performances series. He received a Viv Award for his work in that production. In 2022, Coleman returned to Broadway as Macduff in a production of Macbeth at the Longacre Theatre starring Daniel Craig.

On television, Coleman made an early appearance in 2013 in an episode of the FX series The Americans. Single-episode roles in The Night Shift, Murder in the First, and NCIS followed in 2015, and in 2016 he played Bonnie Ray William across two episodes of the Hulu miniseries 11.22.63. Smaller appearances in Doubt, NCIS: Los Angeles, and The Carmichael Show came in 2017. His first featured television roles arrived in 2023, when he appeared in all ten episodes of the third season of Power Book III: Raising Kanan as former convict Ronnie Mathis, and in all eight episodes of the Paramount+ Western series Lawmen: Bass Reeves as Edwin Jones.

Coleman's film work began in 2019 with Seberg, Benedict Andrews's political thriller in which he portrayed Bobby Seale, a co-founder of the Black Panthers. He played Baako in the 2020 black comedy thriller Black Bear and appeared as Sigmund in the 2021 HBO Max television film Red Bird Lane. Minor roles followed in Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths in 2022 and Rustin in 2023. In 2024, Deadline reported that Coleman had been cast in his first lead role, playing Tal Garland in The Emperor of Ocean Park, an adaptation of the Stephen L. Carter novel, alongside Forest Whitaker.