Star File

Blair Underwood

A true multi-hyphenate, Blair Underwood is enjoying success in film, television and theatre, as an actor, director and producer. Underwood is currently in production on Netflix’s Madam CJ Walker opposite Octavia Spencer. Most recently, he wrapped recurring roles on two other Netflix series: Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, and the comedy series, Dear White People; and can be seen in Clark Johnson’s Juanita, opposite Alfred Woodard, also for Netflix. He spent two years as a series regular on the ABC drama series, Quantico, while also recurring on another hit ABC drama, AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. He also had a co-starring role in The After Party, from writer/director Ian Edelman, which Netflix released late in 2018. Past television credits include series regular roles on Dirty Sexy Money, The New Adventures of Old Christine, In Treatment, L.A. Law and The Event. Film credits include Rules of Engagement, Madea's Family Reunion and Full Frontal, for director Steven Soderbergh. Underwood co-starred opposite Cicely Tyson in the Lifetime telefilm, A Trip To Bountiful, based on the Tony Award-winning play. In 2012 he made his acclaimed Broadway debut in the iconic role of “Stanley" in Tennessee Williams' AStreetcar Named Desire, for which he earned a 2012 Drama League Distinguished Performance Award nomination. Other theater includes: A Trip to Bountiful (Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum/Ahmanson Theatre),Othello (Old Globe Theatre; d: Barry Edelstein), and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare in the Park, 1993). Underwood also has several projects in the development pipeline as a director, including Patch, an elevated genre feature based on a Gregg McBride script. In 2010 he made his feature-film directing debut with The Bridge to Nowhere, which starred Ving Rhames, Danny Masterson, Bijou Phillips and Alex Breckenridge. Blair is an Emmy Award-winner (as producer of the philanthropy-centered NBC Saturday morning series, Give), a two-time Golden Globe Award nominee, and has been nominated for 17 NAACP Image Awards (three wins). He won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word as co-narrator of Al Gore’s audiobook, An Inconvenient Truth. A newly minted member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he is also active in several philanthropic endeavors.