Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is preparing to be everywhere.
After starring in “Watchmen,” which earned him an Emmy Award and recently in Marvel’s “Wonder Man,” the New Orleans native is gearing up to play John Creasy in Netflix’s adaptation of “Man on Fire.” If the name Creasy sounds familiar, it’s the same character Denzel Washington is iconic in the 2004 film of the same name.
As high as Mateen’s star continues to rise, he remains grounded. And going for his dreams has led him right to where he is now. During a recent episode of “The Pivot” with Ryan Clark, Channing Crowder, and Fred Taylor, the 39-year-old actor reflected on his upbringing in New Orleans, his first sense of community and how he later found his drive to become an actor.
“It’s cold because I worked in city planning after college,” Mateen told Clark and company around the six-minute mark. “I worked in city planning, and I got laid off about 10 months into that job.”
Before landing the position in city planning, Mateen was studying architecture at UC Berkeley. In the process of giving presentations and getting comfortable speaking publicly, the “Watchmen” actor had to overcome a stutter inherited from his father. But as the youngest of six and a child who frequently became the “new kid” after attending 13 different schools, he had to find a way.
Acting was his way of attempting to conquer the stutter. It also became his lifeline after getting laid off.
“I said, “Man, I think I’m going to go try the acting thing cuz that was fun.” I said, “Okay, well, this is my plan. I’mma go and, you know, apply to graduate school and really give acting my best shot,” he said. “I’m going to give myself three years to make significant progress. I didn’t know what significant progress meant, but I knew that at the end of three years, if I didn’t make it, that I would go back to graduate school and go study city politics or something like that.
“And at the end of 14 months, I got into Yale and NYU and Harvard and American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.”
That single period of determination ultimately placed Mateen in Connecticut at the prestigious Ivy League school, where he graduated in 2015 with a Master’s of Fine Arts degree. Months later, he made his big-time debut as Cadillac in the short-lived Netflix series, “The Get Down.”
Years later, after the Emmy win for “Watchmen,” Mateen said he learned something that even after leaving school five years prior and now holding one of his profession’s top honors? No award would make him happy.
“That taught me if I call that success, right? What that taught me is like it’s not going to come from nothing external,” he says with affirmation. “That feeling is not going to come from nothing external. It’s going to come from you know, from how you feel about yourself, from like the impact that you make on the world, the impact that you make on your family.”
As he steps into the role of Creasy, Mateen had to check himself, namely the idea that he was competing with Washington, rather than recognizing that Creasy was merely a role the two-time Oscar winner once played. Now he gets to add his own spin to the character and further build the actor’s growing résumé, bringing color to some of TV and film’s most complicated characters.
“One of my acting teachers, he would say, ‘Do you want to be right or do you want to be interesting?’ he recalled. “I was like, ‘Okay, I think I want to be interesting.’ So, sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don’t, but I’m always going for it.”
