Ethan Herisse
THE NICKEL BOYS BREAKOUT STAR IS FINDING LIGHT IN THE DARKEST STORIES
WORDS IANA MURRAY
Ethan Herisse,
DOMIZIA SALUSEST
ACTING WASN’T THE first career choice for Ethan Herisse, the 24-year-old star of powerful historical drama Nickel Boys. In fact, when he was growing up in Massachusetts, he imagined a future on a court shooting hoops. “I was going to be a basketball player,” he recalls, but there was one problem. “I was not good.” When his younger sister, then participating in pageants, was approached to take part in acting workshops, Herisse tagged along and quickly discovered his real passion.
At age 11, his parents asked him if he wanted to pursue acting seriously. The answer was a no-brainer. “For them to hear that from an 11-year-old, and have enough faith in me that young to completely uproot their lives because I said that that was my dream…” he trails off in disbelief. His family moved to Los Angeles, where Herisse picked up small parts before he landed the role of Yusef Salaam, a real-life member of the Central Park Five, whose wrongful conviction and imprisonment in 1990 became the focus of Ava DuVernay’s challenging miniseries, When They See Us. He had just graduated high school, he remembers: “I was thrust into this space where I was working with this phenomenal director in Ava and all of these other incredible actors and actresses.”