Robert Ri'chard
Robert Ri'chard is an actor, born 1983.
Ri'chard came up inside the late-1990s children's television machine and got out of it with his reputation intact. He played Bobby Walker on the Nickelodeon sitcom Cousin Skeeter from 1998 to 2002 and Arnaz Ballard on the UPN sitcom One on One from 2001 to 2006, and while that was happening he won a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Performer in Children's Programming for the television film In His Father's Shoes, and drew an NAACP Image Award nomination for the teen drama Light It Up.
The early-2000s stretch is his most visible: Todd McLemore in the Disney Channel picture Alley Cats Strike, Damien Carter in Coach Carter, Blake Johnson in House of Wax, then the parody The Comebacks. He is a naturally likeable screen presence, and directors used that straightforwardly, casting him as the decent one in the group whose reactions tell the audience how to feel about everyone else.
What followed is the honest version of a teen-star career. The studio roles thinned and he kept working, mostly in independent films: Chocolate City, Kinky, Bolden as George Baquet, Alone, Vicious Affair, Sweetwater. Television has been guest work, including Harlem. That is a quarter century of steady employment starting from child actor, which is a much rarer outcome than the run of hits people remember.
Movies (14)
TV (6)
Where to start with Robert Ri'chard
If you watch one thing, make it Coach Carter. It is the best film he has been in, a high-school basketball drama with a real argument about what a coach owes his players, and Ri'chard plays Damien Carter, the one member of the squad who cannot go home and complain about the man in charge.
For the horror crowd, House of Wax is a 2005 slasher remake that is far better made than its reputation suggests. Light It Up is the serious early one, a school siege drama that got him an Image Award nomination.
If you want the sitcom years, Cousin Skeeter and One on One are where a generation actually met him. Bolden and Harlem show the adult career, and Chocolate City is the independent-film side of it.