By Douglas J. Gladstone
If you’re looking to find Ato Essandoh on any given Sunday morning, try dining at Peck’s.
Essandoh, who resides in a two-bedroom apartment in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, recently told the New York Times that the pastry and coffee shop on Myrtle Avenue is his go-to place.
Besides catching him at Peck’s, you’ve seen Essandoh in films such as Garden State, Hitch and Django Unchained. On the small screen, he’s had recurring roles in Blue Bloods and Chicago Med.
Essandoh is arguably the hardest-working actor of Ghanaian ancestry in film and television today. In New York City, The Bronx has the largest amount of Ghanaian-Americans, according to the U.S. Census. But two years ago, the Borough of Brooklyn reportedly named a street in Bedford-Stuyvesant as Ghana Way. Dr. Ibrahim Mohammed Awal, Ghana’s Minister of Tourism, Arts & Culture, was present at the ceremonies.
Essandoh, who graduated from Cornell University in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering, and who turns 51 years old in July, was born and spent part of his childhood in Schenectady, New York.
Two years ago, while he was promoting his appearance as botanist Kwesi Weisberg-Annan in Away, about an international crew of astronauts on a mission to Mars, Essandoh told an upstate newspaper that his family moved to Schenectady because his father got a job at General Electric.
First and second-generation Ghanaian immigrants to the States comprise only a reported 0.3 percent of foreign-born Americans, but the Essandohs lived in Glenville, on Woodcrest Drive.
“What I remember about Schenectady was just riding bikes all over the place,” Essandoh was quoted as saying in the article. “And that was back in the day where, you know, your parents just kicked you out of the house and then told you on the weekend to come back for dinner.” He added that his favorite place to ride his bike was a gravely area known as “the pits.”
“We would go there with the rest of the neighborhood kids for hours and just tear it up,” he recalled. The family later moved to New Rochelle.
These days, it’s Essandoh who is tearing it up professionally. An eight-episode Netflix series he appears in, The Diplomat, which was filmed primarily in London, dropped on the streaming service on April 20. It stars Keri Russell as the United States Ambassador to Great Britain who is reportedly thrust into a position she’s not prepared for.
On the big screen, he’ll be seen later this year in the upcoming crime thriller Reptile, which also features Benicio Del Toro, Justin Timberlake, Frances Fisher, Eric Bogosian and Alicia Silverstone. Produced by Black Label Media, the story is about a New England detective played by Del Toro trying to solve the murder of a real estate agent. Essandoh plays Del Toro’s partner in the picture.
In a statement furnished by Narrative Public Relations, Black Label Media Producer and Co-Founder Molly Smith indicated that Essandoh was cast in Reptile because “we were so impressed with Ato’s body of work we had seen him in before. And he was in a show called Away where he was brilliant.”
His acting brilliance aside, appearing in Away was also a profoundly moving experience for Essandoh. In September 2020 he told Entertainment Magazine that “before they had cast me, Kwesi was actually a Nigerian character. But when they cast me, knowing I have a Ghanaian background, they wanted to make sure we were being true to my actual heritage, which was really nice…they showed Kwesi’s backstory and he’s speaking Fante. That’s the language my family actually speaks. I don’t know when I have ever seen my parents’ language spoken in that setting, which was amazing.”
“Ato is an incredibly layered actor with a lot of strengths,” Smith continued. “His charisma and warmth stand out.
“He’s the most wonderful person, always with a smile on his face and he was always respectful to all of the cast and crew,” she added. “He was a true pleasure to work with.”
He might even be more of a pleasure than the pastries and breakfast sandwiches at Peck’s.
Douglas J. Gladstone is a freelance writer and author of two books.
