It is starting like this.
Abraham Attah is supposed to be in class facing his studies and being a good boy like his parents would want him to. Instead, he skips class and is playing ball on the field with some other boys somewhere in Accra.
Attah sees a white man approaching the field. First, he thinks the man is a scout, coming to look for players. Then the white man comes and says, ”We need some boys for a movie.”
Mr white man scans the older looking boys and in their midst, he sees one smaller lad, about 13-14. He asks him if he’d love to audition for a movie.
“No, not really,” he says. He is shy, but thank the heavens for the friends that pushed him to do it that day.
He auditions with 1,000 boys, but according to Harrison Nesbit, the casting director and Mr white man, Abraham Attah’s charisma and emotional range stand out from the horde.
Cary Fukunuga, director of Beasts of No Nation has the image of his lead character in his mind. He tells Abraham to act out a scene where his sister is taken away, and Abraham breaks down, and cries.
In these moments, Abraham Attah, the young, unknown from Ghana scores the role of Agwu, the child soldier in Beasts of No Nation.
As expected, the movie was met with critical acclaim. Abraham went on tours, travelled to places he never imagined. But that’s not all, he’s getting cast in a movie he probably grew up watching and loving; Spiderman.
It is not yet clear the role he will be playing, but he has been cast alongside the likes of Tom Holland, who played Spiderman in the last Captain America movie, Robert Downey Jnr the Iron Man, and a bunch of others.
Moral of the story is, IT’S HUGE. And we are rooting for him to smash his role, whatever it is. Like he smashed Beasts of No Nation.
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