He had never acted before. At 14, Abraham Attah beat professionals to a Venice award

Abraham Attah had no acting experience when he was cast as the lead in Netflix’s first original feature film. On 12 September 2015, at 14, he walked onto the stage at the Venice Film Festival to collect an international acting prize.

The award was the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor, given at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival. The film was Beasts of No Nation, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, in which Attah played Agu, a boy in an unnamed West African country who is forced to become a child soldier after his family is destroyed in a civil war.

How he was found

Fukunaga’s team shot the film in Ghana and wanted young, unknown performers for the child soldiers. The casting process went out into schools and neighbourhoods rather than drama schools. Attah was found in Accra, a schoolboy who was spotted by the casting team rather than sent by an agent. He went through the audition process and was cast opposite Idris Elba, who played the Commandant, the warlord who takes Agu under his control.

A Netflix first

Beasts of No Nation was based on the 2005 novel by Uzodinma Iweala. Netflix bought it and released it in October 2015, both online and in a small number of cinemas, as its first original feature film. The release strategy caused a fight in the industry, with several big US cinema chains refusing to show it because it would be streaming on the same day. It was one of the first battles in a war between streaming and cinemas that is still going on.

Elba won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role. Attah received the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead, which put the Ghanaian newcomer on the same list of winners as established Hollywood actors.

After Agu

Attah’s next major role came in Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), where he played Abe, one of Peter Parker’s classmates on the academic decathlon team. He also appeared in Tazmanian Devil and other projects, and moved to the United States to continue his education.

His career since has been steadier than spectacular, which is common for actors whose first role is a breakout. What makes his case unusual is that the breakout was a film about a war in an unnamed West African country, shot in Ghana, with a cast largely drawn from Ghanaian non-professionals, and it still stands among the best-known films ever made in the country.

What the film left in Ghana

The production brought a large international crew to Ghana, trained local crew members and gave dozens of young Ghanaians their first time on a film set. Ghana’s film industry has since pointed to it as proof that big international productions can be made in the country when the conditions are right.

In the film’s last scene, Agu sits on a beach with other boys at a rehabilitation centre and walks into the sea to play. The actor who played him had been a schoolboy in Accra a few months earlier.