Ajiona Alexus
Ajiona Alexus is an actor, born 1996.
Two of Ajiona Alexus's early breaks asked for the same odd trick. She played the teenage Cookie Lyon on Empire and Young Melinda in Acrimony, which means building a character the audience has already met as a grown woman and making the seams line up. Neither of those titles appears on this page, but the run that followed does, and her career began earlier still, on the TV One sitcom The Rickey Smiley Show.
Sheri Holland on 13 Reasons Why gave her one of that show's most quietly awful storylines, and she played it without asking for sympathy. Candace Preston in Light as a Feather, Livvie in Marvel's Runaways and Keesha Platt in Code Black filled out the television years, and Kato in BMF moved her into adult crime drama, where she is more comfortable than the teen work ever suggested.
Her film roles have leaned genre with a strong central presence: Jasmine in the home-invasion thriller Breaking In, Meegan in Family Blood. More recently she has played Kendra three times over in the Mary J. Blige film cycle, Real Love, Strength of a Woman and Family Affair, which is a rare thing for an actor of her generation, a recurring character across a set of films rather than a set of episodes. She is a singer as well.
Movies (6)
TV (5)
Where to start with Ajiona Alexus
Watch 13 Reasons Why first if you want the performance that made her name, with the warning that the show is heavy by design and her arc is among the heaviest parts of it. BMF is the better showcase for what she can do now, with Kato given room to be sharp rather than sympathetic.
After that it splits by appetite. For thriller mechanics, Breaking In is lean and efficient and she is the reason the stakes register. For the young-version-of-a-star trick, Acrimony is the clearest example. Light as a Feather and Marvel's Runaways are the teen-genre detours, and the Mary J. Blige films, starting with Real Love, are best taken as a set rather than one at a time.