Dayo Ade
Dayo Ade is an actor.
Degrassi cast actual teenagers who could not always act yet, and that was the point: the awkwardness on screen was real, which is why the shows still hold up when their contemporaries look like costume drama. Dayo Ade played B.L.T. Thomas across Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High, from 1987 to 1991, one of the franchise's few Black leads and a character the writers gave an interior life rather than a lesson to deliver.
Born in Lagos and working out of Canada, he then did what most of that cast did, which is find out whether there is a career on the other side of a famous adolescence. There was, though it took the shape most working actors would recognise: procedural guest spots on Cracked and 10-8: Officers on Duty, comedy on The Kids in the Hall and The Bill Engvall Show, film work in Unthinkable and Phat Girlz, and a run on the American series StartUp.
The most sustained recent work is Mel Boyd on the CBC sitcom Workin' Moms, which is not among the credits listed here. It makes a good late chapter: a former teen star playing an adult in a show about adults being bad at being adults.
Movies (3)
TV (8)
Where to start with Dayo Ade
Degrassi Junior High first, from the beginning, because the whole franchise depends on watching one specific group of kids get older on camera. B.L.T. is not the centre of the show, but he is in most of the storylines that have aged best, and the writing gives him things to be uncertain about rather than lessons to learn. Degrassi High continues it and is the better-made half.
For the adult work, Unthinkable is the heaviest thing on the list, an interrogation drama with a very good cast, and he is entirely credible in it. StartUp is the bingeable one, a crime series about a digital currency, and Bob Hearts Abishola is the warmest. Cracked is a decent Canadian procedural if you want to watch the guest-star craft up close. If you only know him from Workin' Moms, the Degrassi years are the ones to go back for.