He had never acted before. Abraham Attah was playing football in Accra when casting agents spotted him. A few months later he was starring opposite Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation, playing Agu, a boy forced to become a child soldier. In 2015, he won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best young actor at the Venice Film Festival.
Discovery and the film
Director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s team searched schools and neighbourhoods in Ghana for non-professional young actors. Attah, then about 13, impressed them with his natural presence. Beasts of No Nation, based on Uzodinma Iweala’s novel, follows Agu as war destroys his family and he is recruited by a rebel commander played by Elba. It was filmed in Ghana.
The film was released in 2015 by Netflix, one of the streaming service’s first major original films.
Venice and other roles
At the Venice Film Festival, Attah won the Marcello Mastroianni Award, which honours young actors. Critics praised his raw, moving performance. He also won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead, sharing a stage with established Hollywood stars. Attah later appeared in Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), playing Abe, one of Peter Parker’s classmates. He appeared in Tazmanian Devil, a drama about a young man and his father, and other projects.
Education, child soldiers and fame at home
Attah moved to the United States to continue his education while pursuing acting. The film drew attention to the use of child soldiers in conflicts in West Africa and elsewhere. Attah’s success was celebrated in Ghana, where he became a symbol of what young Ghanaian talent could achieve. Elba, who played the Commandant, praised Attah’s professionalism and talent. The two spent months filming together in Ghana’s Eastern Region.
In Ghana, Attah was celebrated by politicians, schools and the media.
Abroad and the novel
Moving to the United States brought new opportunities and challenges for the teenage actor. Uzodinma Iweala wrote the novel Beasts of No Nation while a student, and it was published in 2005. The film kept the story’s unnamed West African setting, which allowed it to speak about many conflicts at once. Abraham Attah went from a football pitch in Accra to a red carpet in Venice in less than a year. Few debuts in cinema have been so sudden or so widely praised.
