From Ashaiman To Hollywood Set: Things You Didn’t Know About Abraham Attah

Abraham Attah has made Ghana proud by being the first Ghanaian actor to be at the Oscars.

But how well do we know him? Where he comes from, how he started and how far he’s come?

This and many questions we need to answer and so without further ado, here are 15 things you need to know about the new sensation in town, Abraham Attah.

1. He was born on June 15, 2001, that makes him 15 years in June this year.

2. He lives with the parents, the mother is a trader and the father works at the port. He’s not a street child as has been speculated earlier.

3. He has five other siblings.

4. He was picked off the streets of Ashaiman by the cast Director of the “Beasts Of No Nation”, Harrison Nesbit.

5. He’s a natural and according to the Director of the movie, he took charge of most of the directing by telling his young colleagues what to do in the movie. At one point, the Director said, he left the acting in the hands of the young lad who took control of most of the scenes. He also came up with some scenes that were not in the script according to the director, the part he wept when his sister was taken away, was actually not part of the script.

6. Beasts Of No Nation was his first ever film he starred in, he’s never acted in his life before.

7. He’s already been featured in 2 movies already besides Beasts Of No Nation, coming out soon in 2016. He is featured in Shane Carruth’s third movie “The Modern Ocean” and also on “Out Of The Village” a new movie.

8. He’s never been in a war before and has never experienced war in his life and do not even know how child soldiers felt like, unlike some of the casts in the film who were actually former child soldiers from Liberia. This what makes him a natural.

9. So far, he’s won 5 awards and was nominated for 7 awards.

10. He was actually discovered when he skipped class and went to play football with his friends. That is where the director found him and decided to use him in the movie.

“Attah was skipping class and playing soccer on a school field when casting director Harrison Nesbit walked over and asked him if he’d be interested in auditioning for a movie”.

11. He hesitated auditioning for the cast, he was actually pushed by his friends to go for it.

According to Harrison Nesbit,

“I saw that among the older kids was this young-looking guy, maybe 13 or 14. I asked him if he was interested in auditioning for a film. He said, ‘No, not really.’ I guess he was shy. But later, kids kind of pushed him to do it. And once he got on camera, he just started rapping and there was just this kind of a charm about him, and we invited him to come to a callback session.”

12. Besides acting he’s also good at Rapping which was mentioned by the Cast Director, Harrison Nesbit in one of his interviews. He showcased this in the movie by rapping some lines of Shatta Wale’s, “like my thing” song.

13. He is scared of snakes and also mentioned he was afraid acting beside Edris Elba because he made him look like an ant but beside that, he made it clear he was afraid of snakes.

14. His favorite scene in the movie was when he had to lead the team to enter a village to kill the villagers. He felt like the commandant in that scene. In an interview with times, he said,

“My favorite scene was [when] we were in the jungle, and I was in front of the audience, and behind me, we were going to kill the people who live in the village. So I was the commandant,”

15. The scene he hated most in the movie was the part he had to wear only shorts and slippers and he had to walk in the jungle without seeing the danger ahead of him, the danger here being his fear of snakes. In an interview with times he mentioned that,

“the scene I hate was when we were shooting in the jungle, and I was wearing shorts and slippers and Cary told me to pass through very deep bushes. And I was afraid to see any dangers that were in the bush.”

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