Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (born 1986) is the American actor who played Anthony McCoy in Candyman and Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen.
Quick Specs
| Born | July 15, 1986, New Orleans, Louisiana |
| Raised | The Magnolia Projects, New Orleans; Oakland (McClymonds High School) and Stockton, California |
| Training | Architecture degree, University of California, Berkeley; MFA, Yale School of Drama (2015) |
| Horror | Russel Thomas and his Tethered double Weyland in Us (2019); Anthony McCoy in Candyman (2021) |
| Signature roles | Clarence “Cadillac” Caldwell in The Get Down (2016 to 2017); David Kane, Black Manta, in Aquaman (2018) and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023); Cal Abar, Doctor Manhattan, in Watchmen (2019); Bobby Seale in The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020); Booth in Topdog/Underdog on Broadway (2022 to 2023); Simon Williams in Wonder Man (2026) |
| Honours | Primetime Emmy, Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie (2020); Tony nomination (2023); Theatre World Award; Critics’ Choice Super Award, Best Actor in a Horror Movie, for Candyman |
| Producing | Founder of House Eleven10 (2021) |
Who He Is
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II was born on July 15, 1986, in New Orleans, Louisiana, the youngest of six children. The “II” is real. His father, born John Ford in 1945, took the name Yahya Abdul-Mateen when he converted to Islam and was a member of the New Orleans Masjid of Al-Islam; his son is the second of that name. His mother, Mary, is a Christian. His father died in 2007, when Yahya was 20.
He spent his early childhood in the Magnolia Projects in New Orleans. The family then moved to Oakland, California, where he went to McClymonds High School, and was later priced out of Oakland and moved to Stockton. At McClymonds he was an athlete and, in his own description, a geek who played chess, and he was voted prom king.
He studied architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated with a degree in it. At Berkeley he joined Alpha Phi Alpha and ran hurdles for the California Golden Bears. A theatre class there helped him overcome a stutter he has said he inherited from his father. After graduating he worked as a city planner in San Francisco. When he was laid off, he applied to drama schools, went to the Yale School of Drama, and earned his Master of Fine Arts in 2015.
Early on he refused suggestions that he shorten or change his Muslim name for his career. At school, he has said, he was “Ya-ya,” and at home and at the masjid he was “Yahya.” “As long as people know it and it’s associated with the right things, then I’m usually all right.” He lives in New York City.
The Work, and What He Did in It
His screen breakthrough came a year out of Yale. In Baz Luhrmann and Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Netflix series The Get Down (2016 to 2017), set in the Bronx at the birth of hip-hop, he played Clarence “Cadillac” Caldwell, the flamboyant prince of the disco world, in a main role. He was 30 at the August 2016 premiere. The series was cancelled after one season.
Small film parts followed in 2017: Duane Jones in The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, which premiered at Sundance; Sergeant Garner Ellerbee, a beach police officer, in Baywatch; and W. D. Wheeler, acrobat partner to Zendaya’s Anne Wheeler, in The Greatest Showman. In 2018 he was Darrel, the estranged father of a teenage wrestler, in First Match; Serge in Boundaries; and Omar in the “Baggage” episode of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Aquaman (2018) was the blockbuster hinge. James Wan directed. Abdul-Mateen, 32, plays David Kane, the mercenary who becomes Black Manta. His father is killed during Arthur Curry’s intervention on a submarine, which gives Manta his revenge; he builds the Manta suit from Atlantean technology and fights Aquaman in the Sicily sequence. The film cost about $160 million and took about $1.15 billion worldwide, the highest-grossing DC film of its era.
Us (2019) is where the Jordan Peele story pays off. He had auditioned for Get Out and not got the part. He is not in that film, and he filmed nothing for it. But Peele remembered him and cast him in Us. Abdul-Mateen plays Russel Thomas, the father of the young Adelaide, in the flashbacks set on the Santa Cruz boardwalk in 1986, and also Weyland, Russel’s Tethered double. Abraham, the other big Tethered man in the film, is Winston Duke’s character, the double of Gabe Wilson. Jason Blum was among the producers. On that film, he has said, Peele gave him a piece of advice he kept: “Don’t do it if you don’t love it.”
The same year he co-led “Striking Vipers,” the opening episode of the fifth series of Black Mirror, as Karl, one of two friends, with Anthony Mackie as the other, whose relationship as fighting-game avatars blurs into something else. He was Aziz in Sweetness in the Belly (2019) and Big Stunna in All Day and a Night (2020).
Watchmen (HBO, 2019) made him. In Damon Lindelof’s series he was cast as Cal Abar, the apparently ordinary husband of Angela Abar (Regina King). The series held back its central secret until late in its nine episodes: Cal is Doctor Manhattan, living in a human form with his memory suppressed. He appeared in eight episodes. On September 20, 2020, at 34, he won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie.
In Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) he played Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party and the eighth defendant, who was bound and gagged in the courtroom and denied counsel during the 1969 trial. It is the film’s most haunting strand, and the cast won the Screen Actors Guild Award for a motion-picture cast.
Candyman (2021) is the horror centrepiece, and it was his first lead in a film. Nia DaCosta directed, from a script by Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld and DaCosta. It is a direct sequel to Bernard Rose’s 1992 film, not a remake, and it ignores the sequels of 1995 and 1999. Abdul-Mateen plays Anthony McCoy, a Chicago visual artist whose career has stalled. Researching the Candyman legend for new work, he is stung by a bee on his hand, and a spreading physical decay runs alongside his obsession as the killings resume. Then comes the reveal: Anthony is the baby from the 1992 film, the infant Candyman took and Helen Lyle died saving, a fact his mother, Anne-Marie (Vanessa Williams, returning to the role), had hidden from him. In the climax William Burke (Colman Domingo) saws off Anthony’s hand, fits a hook in its place, and arranges for the police to shoot him so that he will join the Candyman “hive.” Summoned by Brianna (Teyonah Parris), the transformed Anthony slaughters the officers, his face becoming Daniel Robitaille’s, with the instruction “Tell everyone.”
He did not replace Tony Todd. Todd appears in the film as Robitaille, the original Candyman; Anthony becomes a new one. The film opened on August 27, 2021, when Abdul-Mateen was 35, and made $77.4 million worldwide on a $25 million budget. He won the Critics’ Choice Super Award for Best Actor in a Horror Movie.
In The Matrix Resurrections (2021) he plays a new Morpheus, but not as a recast of Laurence Fishburne. His character is a program that Neo built inside a modal, described in the film as an “algorithmic reflection of two forces that helped you become you, Morpheus and Agent Smith. A combo pack of counterprogramming.” Freed by Bugs, he takes on the Morpheus job, red pill, mentor and believer, in a body made of a swarm of nanobots.
In Michael Bay’s Ambulance (2022) he was Will Sharp, a decorated veteran who joins his adoptive brother’s bank heist to pay for his wife’s surgery. He came back as Black Manta in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023), now wielding the Black Trident as the sequel’s principal villain.
His Broadway debut was Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning two-hander, from September 2022 to January 2023 at the John Golden Theatre, directed by Kenny Leon. He played Booth opposite Corey Hawkins as Lincoln, and both men were nominated for the 2023 Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Play. He also won the Theatre World Award for an outstanding debut.
In November 2021 he launched his production company, House Eleven10, with a creative partnership with Netflix, to star in and produce films focused on stories from his youth and under-represented communities. In October 2022 he was cast as Simon Williams in Marvel’s Wonder Man, which premiered on Disney+ on January 27, 2026, giving him the rare double of a DC villain and a Marvel lead.
Cool Verified Facts
- He is not in Get Out. He auditioned for it, did not get it, and Peele cast him in Us instead.
- In Us his Tethered is Weyland. Abraham is Winston Duke’s.
- In Candyman he plays the baby Helen Lyle saved in 1992, grown up.
- He studied architecture at Berkeley and worked as a city planner before Yale.
- He ran hurdles for the California Golden Bears.
- He wears mismatched socks to auditions.
- He won an Emmy for a role whose secret was kept from him when he took it.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
He never finished the Candyman game as a child. He first saw the original film at “five or six years old,” he has said, and growing up “it was always either Bloody Mary or Candyman, and I didn’t have the courage to play either one to its completion.” He has described playing it in front of the bathroom mirror with his sisters: “No one was brave enough to get up to five. We’d get to four before someone found a clever way out.” What stayed with him was the iconography: “the guy with the hook and the honey and the bees coming out of his mouth.”
He prepared like a city planner. Arriving in Chicago, “the first thing that I did… was walk around [what used to be] Cabrini-Green,” with a camera and a notebook, like Anthony. “I definitely think the neighbourhood researcher part of my brain prepared me.” The role took a toll: “There were some days when I did absolutely pay for it, physically and emotionally. The body doesn’t know that it’s acting. You have to let it cool down.” He has said he studied the physical deterioration in The Fly, and Rosemary’s Baby, to prepare.
Costume is how he gets in. “Costuming is usually the way I get into my characters,” he has said; for Cadillac it was an all-cream suit, a snakeskin shirt, three chains and lion jewellery, and for Seale, “the thing that unlocked Bobby Seale for me was his mustache.” He has an audition ritual too: “When I audition, I wear mismatched socks. I do that because then I already know that I messed up; it takes the pressure off.”
Watchmen kept its secret from him. He took Cal largely for the chance to work with Regina King, thinking it “another supporting role,” and the Doctor Manhattan layers were revealed to him only after several weeks of shooting. On the Emmy that followed: “It doesn’t hurt at all to have an Emmy on the table when I’m in negotiations for projects.” On the gym: “I’m still waiting on that ice-cream role: the role where I can sit back and watch TV and eat ice-cream and that’s gonna be my preparation!”
Why He Matters
For horror, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is the face of the 2021 Candyman. He is not a remake’s substitute monster but the grown child of the original film, which makes Anthony McCoy the rare horror lead who is the sequel’s hero, its victim and its new monster at once. Add the Us flashbacks, and the Peele relationship behind them, and he is one of the defining performers of the wave of social horror that followed Get Out, a wave he joined by failing an audition and being remembered.
His résumé has an unusual spread: architecture degree, city-planning job, layoff, Yale, disco prince, DC villain, Emmy-winning Doctor Manhattan, Bobby Seale, a Morpheus program, a Tony nomination and a Marvel lead. The horror work sits at the centre of it.
He is also building something. House Eleven10 and his stated aim, Black stories told with “joy… love… magic and hopefulness and possibility,” not only trauma, mark him as a performer turning a breakout decade into a body of work he controls.