Clé Bennett – Biography
by William Wise
(July, 2013 – Toronto, ON) Born in Toronto to Jamaican parents and raised in Ajax, Ontario, Clé Bennett is a busy singer, musician, voice and character actor who broke into the business in 1998 with an appearance in the made-for-television movie Mr. Music. His many other television credits include 15 episodes of CTV’s award-winning series Flashpoint, plus Soul Food, Odyssey 5, Instant Star, Soul, 15 episodes of The Line, five episodes of Lost Girl, 13 of Shattered, The Listener and Republic of Doyle.
His feature film and movies-for-television credits include a small part in Antoine Fugua’s Bait starring Jamie Foxx in 2000, one of the leads in William Philips’s Treed Murray, the Oscar-nominated Barney’s Version, the urban dance drama How She Move, Hendrix, Livin’ for Love: The Natalie Cole Story, Harvard Man and David Sutherland’s Doomstown. Bennett made his professional theatre debut in 2012 on the Soulpepper stage in Toronto, with his critically acclaimed portrayal of four characters in Ins Choi’s hit play Kim’s Convenience. It went on to win the Toronto Critics Award for best Canadian play and picked up a Dora Award nomination for best new play.
Photo by Ralph Lucas for Northernstars.ca © 2010
The versatile actor is well known for his voice-over commercial work for Coca-Cola, Ford and Wrigley’s Gum, the Total Drama franchise, an animated reality series, Skatoony, a children’s quiz show with animated cartoon characters, CBC’s Razzberry Jazzberry Jam and the cyberpunk-themed action role-playing video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It was recently announced that Bennett has joined Desperate Housewives star and producer Eva Longoria in voicing a 13-episode animated primetime adult comedy series, Mother Up!, released in fall 2013 on CityTV.
Bennett won two Gemini Awards in 2010: Best Performance by an Actor in a featured supporting role for the CBC mini-series Guns, and Best Performance by a featured supporting actor in a dramatic series for HBO’s The Line. Bennett is one of a very short list of actors who have won two Geminis in one year. He also received a 2012 ACTRA Award nomination for outstanding male performance for his role as Raf Rousseau in season 4 of Flashpoint.
Interviewed by Urbanology.com about his work in the play Kim’s Convenience, Bennett said this about his career choice to become an actor: “I didn’t really decide to become an actor; it was more me deciding to embrace the fact that I am an actor. Like when I was a kid I used to play a lot, just like every kid, but I took playing make believe seriously and basically what I do right now is just an evolution of that.”
Also see: Clé Bennett’s filmography.
This biography was written for Northernstars.ca by Wyndham Wise and may not be reproduced without prior written permission. Click here for more about copyright.
