AllMovie

Factsheet

• Grew up the son of a Filipino father and German-Irish mother who got divorced before he turned 1.
• Moved all the time as a U.S. Air Force brat living in Florida, Iceland, California and Colorado.
• Started playing competitive tennis while in elementary school and eventually attended Queens University in Charlotte on a tennis scholarship.
• Loved singing and dancing as a kid, but it wasn't until he was a junior in college that he enrolled on a whim in his first acting class.
• Won rave reviews—and a 2013 Theatre World Award as one of the newcomers of the year—for playing Ninoy Aquino in David Byrne and Fatboy Slim's Imelda Marcos rock musical Here Lives Love.
• Made his Broadway debut in 2015 as Lun Tha in the Lincoln Center Theater's Tony Award-winning revival of The King and I.
• Received the 2016 Human Rights Campaign's Visibility Award for his portrayal of an HIV-positive, sexually active gay man of color on the ABC show How to Get Away With Murder.
• Discovered, while using the genealogy Web site ancestry.com, that his ninth great-grandfather on his mother's side married Judith Shakespeare, the youngest daughter of the great bard William Shakespeare.