Career
Early work James got his start in television starring for two seasons in the long-running Canadian teen series Degrassi: The Next Generation. After leaving Degrassi, James played various supporting roles on television, including in the TV series How To Be Indie (2011), My Babysitter's a Vampire (2011), The Listener (2012), and The LA Complex (2012), as well as the ABC Family made-for-TV movie 12 Dates of Christmas (2011). Breakthrough James landed his first major feature film role playing opposite Tatyana Ali and Fefe Dobson in the Canadian film Home Again (2012), in which he played a Jamaican deportee.
In 2013, James was cast as civil rights activist John Lewis in Ava Duvernay's Martin Luther King, Jr. film Selma (2014), which went on to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. When asked about the proposed "snubs" the film received from the Academy, James said: To me, I’ve always seen this film as a victory really, even before I saw the finished version. No award can amount to the way I feel about what we’ve done with this film.
We’ve done something so relevant to our youth. In 2015, James guest starred in the CBC television mini-series The Book of Negroes, based on the award-winning novel of the same name by Lawrence Hill. At the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, James was named as one of TIFF's Rising Stars.
In celebration of Black History Month, James was named by CBC as one of their '6 black Canadian culture-makers,' citing Oprah Winfrey as one of his biggest influences. In 2016, James starred in the lead role of African-American track and field sprinter Jesse Owens in the biopic Race (2016) opposite Jason Sudeikis, replacing Star Wars star John Boyega.
