Famous for his role in Beasts of No Nation, Abraham Attah is a Ghanian actor estimated to have a net worth pegged between $700,000 to $1.5 million.
Being worth this much at such an early stage in your career isn’t bad for any upcoming actor, particularly someone with such an intriguing journey to fame like Attah.
For many in the film business today, either acting or having a behind-the-scenes role was a childhood dream they pursued and worked hard to make a reality. For this young Ghana actor, however, his story is different. Rather than acting being a dream for him, it was fate that smiled on him and brought him in front of the camera. The young originally wanted to become a musician (Rapper) or even an athlete but along the way landed a movie role that changed his entire life.
Abraham Attah Began His Acting Career After He was Discovered By a Director While Skipping Class To Play Football
Born Abraham Nii Attah on the 2nd of July 2001, in Accra, Ghana, the young actor is a member of the Ga-Dangme ethnic group found in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. According to a report, he was raised in a stable family in Accra alongside his five siblings. Attah’s mother worked in a local market while his father worked at the port.
As a schoolboy, before his acting days, the young Ghanaian was known to skip classes to play football. Fortune, however, smiled on him on one of the days he was a truant as he was discovered by casting director Harrison Nesbit who spotted him playing a game of soccer in the streets of Accra. Nesbit is said to have then invited him to be a part of Netflix’s first original feature film, Beasts of No Nation.
Attah was initially not interested in auditioning for a role in the movie but he was persuaded by his friends to at least try it out. Despite his complete lack of acting experience, he impressed the whole casting team with his performance and got the role, beating 1000 other youngsters who also auditioned for it. Cary Joji Fukunaga, director and writer of the project, would later reveal in an interview that Attah was picked because of his rapping skills and confidence in front of the camera compared to the other kids.
Abraham Attah went on to play the character of Agu opposite Idris Elba in Fukunaga’s big-screen adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s 2005 novel. He was the orphaned teenager who was forced to join a unit of mercenary fighters during an unnamed African country’s civil war. Attah did exceptionally well in the movie and has since earned feature roles in other movies.
Did Attah Really Make Over $1 Million From Beasts of No Nation?
From the state of being an unknown actor, Abraham Attah stole the show from more established co-stars, including the aforementioned Idris Alba, with one of the most impressive screen debuts of the decade.
The Ghanaian actor made a huge amount of money from the role he played in the movie. While the official figure he was paid remains unknown, he is believed to have made over a million dollars from the movie that made close to $100,000 at the box office. Netflix further paid around $12 million for worldwide distribution rights of the film.
His Role in the Movie Earned Him The Marcello Mastroianni Award
Abraham Attah’s role in the Beasts of No Nation movie projected him to the world as a talented boy and he received global acclaim for it, including the Marcello Mastroianni Best Young Actor award. He became the youngest Ghanian actor to win the award.
Attah further received the Best Male Lead Award at the Independent Spirit Awards. Other awards he got because of this role include:
- Black Film Critics Circle Rising Star Award
- Ghana Movie Awards Best Actor in a Leading Role and Discovery of the Year
- National Board of Review Award for Best Breakthrough Performance
He also got several other nominations for his role. They include:
- Circuit Community Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
- Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Young Performer
- NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture
- Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture and others.
The Actor Moved on to Star in Spider-Man: Homecoming Among Other Projects
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), the Jon Watts-directed movie from Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios, became Attah’s first major role after Beasts of No Nation. He played the role of Abe Brown and was cast alongside actors like Donald Glover, Martin Starr, Logan Marshall-Green, Tom Holland, Robert Downey Jr, and Michael Keaton.
The young actor has since then featured in other movies such as Out of the Village (2015), a short film where he played the role of Mebro, one of two siblings who attempted to find closure after their West African community is destroyed by the Ebola virus.
In 2020, Attah appeared in Tazmanian Devil where he featured as Dayo Ayodele. The movie is centered around a 19-year-old Nigerian immigrant (Attah) who relocated to the US to meet his estranged father who abandoned him and his wife in pursuit of his calling as a missionary. The boy struggles all through to bond with his father. The movie also features other acts like Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine and Kwesi Boakye.
Other Sources of Income of the Actor
There are no other known sources of income of the young actor asides from acting. Despite the report that he made over a million dollars from his debut movie, the figures he made from the other movies he has featured in are not known.
Apart from the pictorial endorsement of Ghana’s Free Educational policy in 2015, there has not been news that the actor signed an endorsement deal with any brand both in Ghana or anywhere else across the globe. Thus, his major and only source of income at the moment is possibly from his acting career.