Thomas Olajide

Thomas Antony Olajide is a Dora Mavor Moore Award-nominated, Toronto-based actor and a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada. He attended the Canadian Film Centre’s CBC Actors Conservatory, completing his studies in 2017. He co-authored the play Black Boys about the complex dynamics of the queer black male experience. His co-writers included two other black men, a black woman and a white man. Some theatre credits include Black Boys, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Hamlet, and King Lear in 2014, for which he received the Stratford Festival’s Peter Donaldson Award for Great Promise in Shakespeare and the Classics. Other plays include Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, Oliver!, And Slowly Beauty, The Whipping Man, and Ruined. His work in the mini-series Nomades brought a Best Actor nomination at the 2020 Prix Gémeaux.

He was named a TIFF Rising Star in August 2021 along with Emma Ferreira, his costar in the feature Learn to Swim. In the film they both act and perform, Olajide playing the saxophone, and Ferreira singing.