Amandla Stenberg (born October 23, 1998) is an American actress. She began acting as a child in the film Colombiana (2011). She had supporting roles in the action film The Hunger Games (2012), the supernatural series Sleepy Hollow (2013–2014) and the sitcom Mr. Robinson (2015). As an adult, Stenberg had starring roles in the romance film Everything, Everything (2017), the drama film The Hate U Give (2018), the comedy horror film Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), and the series The Acolyte (2024).
Stenberg is vocal in her activism for LGBT youth. She made her musical debut as part of the folk rock duo Honeywater, formed in 2015, and performed the song "Let My Baby Stay" for Everything, Everything.
Early life
Amandla Stenberg, born in Los Angeles, California, is the child of Karen Brailsford, an African-American spiritual counselor and writer, and Tom Stenberg, who is Danish.[2][3][4][5] She has Greenlandic Inuit ancestry through her paternal grandmother, Ena Stenberg, who was from Greenland during Danish colonial rule. Ena Stenberg moved to Denmark before the end of colonialism in Greenland. She was a radio personality and singer in Denmark who performed with a group called Mik that sang at the World’s Fair in New York in 1964. Ena Stenberg was associated with the Danish colonial community in Greenland before moving to Denmark.[6][7] Stenberg has two older half-sisters on her father's side.[8][9]
Her first name means "power" or "strength" in the South African languages of IsiXhosa and Zulu.[10] At age four, Stenberg started doing catalog modeling shoots for Disney.[1] She has appeared in commercials for clients such as Boeing and Kmart.[11][12]
Career
2011–2016: Early roles
In 2011, she appeared in her first feature film, Colombiana, as a younger version of Zoe Saldana's character.[13] Her breakthrough came at the age of 14, when she was cast as Rue in the 2012 film The Hunger Games.[14] The film was a critical and financial success,[15][16] and Stenberg's performance was praised. She received a number of awards and nominations, including a Black Reel Award nomination.[17] In 2013, she was cast in the short film Mercy playing the daughter of Robin Thicke and Paula Patton; Thicke directed the film.[18][19] Stenberg had a recurring role on season one of Sleepy Hollow from 2013 to 2014.[20]
In 2013, Stenberg began performing on the violin and singing harmonies at Los Angeles venues with singer-songwriter Zander Hawley. In 2014, Stenberg voiced Bia in the animated film Rio 2, which was a commercial success.[21][22] In 2015, Stenberg released her first EP in August 2015 as the folk-rock duo Honeywater. In 2015, she released the video "Don't Cash Crop My Cornrows".[23] She played series regular Halle Foster on the short-lived series Mr. Robinson, which ran in 2015.[24] Stenberg co-wrote the comic book Niobe: She is Life with Sebastian Jones, which was illustrated by Ashley A. Woods, and published in November 2015.[25][26] It is the first nationally distributed comic that has a black woman as its protagonist, author, and another as the artist.[27]
In 2016, Stenberg appeared in Beyoncé: Lemonade by Beyoncé,[28] and won the BET YoungStars Award.[29] In the same year, she signed with The Society, a modelling agency.[30] Also in 2016, Stenberg had auditioned for the role of Shuri in the superhero filmBlack Panther, however, she walked away because she felt that she was not right for the role. She told Variety magazine in 2018: "It was so exhilarating to see it fulfilled by people who should have been a part of it and who deserved it and who were right for it. I just wasn't."[31][32] The role was instead given to actress Letitia Wright.
In 2017, Stenberg and Sebastian Jones released Niobe: She is Death, the second part of the trilogy.[33] In the same year, she starred in the romantic drama Everything, Everything, directed by Stella Meghie,[34][35] and co-starring Nick Robinson. Her single, "Let My Baby Stay", was featured in the film's soundtrack.[36] She received praise for her performance, and earned a Teen Choice Award nomination.[37]
In 2018, she played the lead role of Starr Carter in the contemporary drama The Hate U Give, based on the novel of the same name, which is about the Black Lives Matter movement. The film was received positively,[38] and Stenberg received critical acclaim for her performance, with the magazine Rolling Stone writing "It is impossible to over-praise Stenberg's incandescent performance, a gathering storm that grows in ferocity and feeling with each scene."[38] The film's director, George Tillman Jr., wrote that "She has this ability to make you feel like you're seeing the real deal, which comes from a level of dedication to the material that's rare at any age."[39] She earned several awards and nominations for the role, which include winning an NAACP Image Award and being nominated for a Critics' Choice Award.[40][41] In late 2018, Stenberg starred in Amma Asante's World War II drama Where Hands Touch.[42][43]
In 2019, Stenberg portrayed Elizabeth Eckford, a 15-year-old girl who in 1957 was among a group of nine black students who were initially prevented from entering a racially segregated high school in Little Rock, during a segment on the television show Drunk History (2019).[44] In May 2019, she joined the cast of the Netflix miniseries The Eddy,[45] which was released on May 8, 2020. That same month, she signed on to star in the remake of the 1996 thriller film Fear.[46]
In August 2020, she was cast as Alana Beck in Stephen Chbosky's film adaptation of the broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen. She also collaborated with the show's composers, Pasek and Paul, on "The Anonymous Ones", a new song written specifically for her character, whose role was expanded upon from the stage version.[47]
2021-present: Star Wars
In 2021, Stenberg was cast in the main role for the Star Wars series The Acolyte.[48][49] On August 28, 2024, she shared via Instagram Stories that the cancellation of the show was "not a huge shock to [her]" due to the "hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, prejudice, hatred and hateful language" it received from Star Wars fans.[50] In May 2023, she was announced as part of the voice cast of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse as Margo Kess / Spider-Byte.[51]
On October 6, 2018, Teen Vogue published an op-ed Stenberg had written for the magazine, in which she shared that she experienced two separate counts of sexual assault.[69]
From early 2018 to late 2018, Stenberg dated singer Mikaela Mullaney Straus, better known by her stage name King Princess.[70] In a July 2017 interview, Stenberg said she had stopped using a smartphone, believing that such devices and social media can have a negative effect on mental health.[71] From 2018 to 2020, she was in a relationship with singer-songwriter Lindsey Jordan.[72][73]
During 2020, Stenberg lived in Copenhagen for three months in order to retain her Danish citizenship.[74]
Dazed magazine named Stenberg "one of the most incendiary voices of her generation" when it featured her on its Autumn 2015 cover.[75] She was included in Time's list of Most Influential Teens in 2015 and again in 2016.[76][77] In 2016, she was included in the SuperSoul 100 list of visionaries and influential leaders by Oprah Winfrey.[78]
On June 19, 2024, Stenberg released "Discourse", a song that was created to address the racial prejudice she has endured. The track references a viral 2018 interview she had with Trevor Noah, in which Stenberg raps "white people crying actually was the goal" of The Hate U Give, a film she stars in about the aftermath of a black teenager's murder by a police officer.[84]
