Daniel Sunjata

Daniel Sunjata Condon is an American actor. He is known for his role as Franco Rivera in the FX television series Rescue Me. Sunjata has received acclaim for his more recent role as Adam Karadec in the ABC television series High Potential.

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Early life and education

Sunjata was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago. He is the adopted son of Bill and Catherine Condon, a police dispatcher and a civil rights worker. His adoptive parents are of Irish and Italian-German descent. He is named in honor of the Mandinka king Sundiata Keita, founder of the Mali Empire; the name means "hungry lion." He was told his biological mother was a white teenager who had run away from home and his father was African-American. He graduated from Mount Carmel High School in Chicago, where he played linebacker for two state championship football teams. After attending Florida A&M University, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and a Master of Fine Arts from the Graduate Acting Program at New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

Career

Sunjata played the role of a sailor on shore leave on the first post-9/11 themed episode of Sex and the City. He portrayed poet Langston Hughes in the film Brother to Brother and James Holt, a fashion designer, in The Devil Wears Prada.
He starred as firefighter Franco Rivera on the television program Rescue Me. During the summer of 2007, he also starred in the ESPN miniseries The Bronx is Burning as Reggie Jackson. He appeared as a Special Forces Operative in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises.
In 2003, he won a Theatre World Award for his breakout Broadway performance as a gay Major League Baseball player who comes out to the public in Take Me Out, the Tony award-winning play, which also earned him nominations for a Tony Award and Drama Desk Award.
In 2010–2011, he played "Nurse Eli" on the TV series Grey's Anatomy and had a relationship with Dr. Miranda Bailey.
Beginning in 2013, he played FBI agent Paul Briggs on Graceland, which aired on USA Network. The show was canceled in 2015 after 3 seasons.
He also starred as Mecca the past lover of Monet in Power Book II: Ghost on Starz for season 2.
From 2024, Sunjata has starred as Detective Adam Karadec in the ABC/Hulu series High Potential.

Views on the September 11 attacks

On April 30, 2009, Sunjata announced that he would narrate Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup, the last in the Loose Change documentary film series that advocates several conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks. Producers of Rescue Me created a subplot of the show for that year's fifth season in which Sunjata's character, Franco Rivera, creates controversy in the firehouse when he tells a journalist that he, like Sunjata in real life, believes 9/11 was an inside job.