Emmanuel Kabongo
Emmanuel Kabongo is a Canadian actor. Born and raised in Zaire, Kabongo immigrated to Canada with his family in 1998. He began his acting career as an extra before achieving recognition for his performance as the lead protagonist in the acclaimed web series Teenagers, for which he earned a Canadian Screen Award nomination in 2016. He subsequently played recurring roles on the CBC Television series 21 Thunder and Frankie Drake Mysteries. He has also starred in the feature films The Animal Project, Antibirth, and Brown Girl Begins.
Early life
Kabongo was born and raised in Zaire and relocated with his family to South Africa during the war. In 1998, Kabongo immigrated to Toronto with his family.Career
Kabongo began acting in 2009, appearing in an amateur short film. He subsequently worked as an extra on the television series Nikita and Flashpoint. Kabongo's first role in a full-length feature film came in 2013 with the release of The Animal Project, directed by Ingrid Veninger. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and received generally positive reviews.Throughout the 2010s, Kabongo guest-starred in a variety of television programs, including Call Me Fitz, Murdoch Mysteries, Rookie Blue, and Quantico. He completed an actor's residency at Norman Jewison's Canadian Film Centre in 2015.
In 2014, Kabongo portrayed a gladiator in Paul W. S. Anderson's romantic historical disaster film Pompeii. The film won the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television's Golden Screen Award for 2014 as the year's top-grossing Canadian film.
Alongside filmmaker M. H. Murray, Kabongo co-produced the first season of the web series Teenagers. In 2013, Murray approached Kabongo with the scripts and asked him to help produce the series; they subsequently cast the rest of the characters together using only actors from Toronto. Louis Chunovic of Playback published a piece on the series, writing that "the young creators of Teenagers had to have plenty of luck, pluck, talent, and grit to get this far. And that portends a Hollywood ending". Kabongo also starred as the lead male protagonist in the series. Teenagers received positive reviews from critics and was frequently compared to the Degrassi franchise and the UK television series Skins. The series amassed more than 10 million combined views on YouTube over the course of three seasons, from 2014 to 2017.
In 2016, Kabongo produced and starred in A Man's Story, a short film for which he received funding from bravoFACT. The short film premiered at the ReelWorld Film Festival. That year, he also played a supporting role in Antibirth, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was released on September 2, 2016 in the U.S., by IFC Midnight.
In September 2016, CBC announced it had commissioned a one-hour drama series that follows the star players of an under-21 soccer academy in Montreal, titled 21 Thunder, with Kabongo slated to star as one of the lead characters, an Ivory Coast mid-fielder named Junior Lolo. The series premiered in Canada on July 31, 2017, to generally positive reviews. Also that year, Kabongo appeared in three episodes of the CBC series Frankie Drake Mysteries as a boxer named Moses, and he starred opposite Mouna Traoré in Brown Girl Begins, a post-apocalyptic science fiction film directed by Sharon Lewis.
Accolades
In 2013, Kabongo won the award for Best African Actor at the African Entertainment Awards, in Toronto. In 2014, at the Los Angeles Web Series Festival, he shared the award for Outstanding Drama Series with M. H. Murray and Sara Tamosauskas, as producers of Teenagers. In 2016, for his performance in the second season of Teenagers, Kabongo received a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Performance in a Program or Series Produced for Digital Media. In 2017, he was nominated for an IAWTV Award for his performance in the third season of Teenagers.Filmography
Film
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
| 2009 | The Red Pearl | John | Minor role |
| 2011 | Night Express | Crazy Billy | Minor role |
| 2013 | The Animal Project | Ray | Main role |
| 2014 | Pompeii | African Gladiator | Minor role |
| 2016 | Antibirth | Luke | Supporting role |
| 2016 | A Man's Story | Kam Eganda | bravoFACT short film, also producer |
| 2017 | Brown Girl Begins | Tony | Supporting role |