On Day One of the 2024 ESSENCE Festival of Culture, our Film Festival kicked off with an intimate chat with one of Hollywood’s most active forces, Aml Ameen.
The actor-producer-screenwriter sat with the creatives in attendance and broke down his journey to becoming a multihyphenate creator in Hollywood. Working both in front of and behind the lens, both as an actor in projects like Yardie, Boxing Day, and most recently, Netflix’s A Man in Full and as a producer and writer through his production studio, 113.
“I’m one of nine children, so I picked up a camera and with my brothers and sisters would create these monologues or do renditions of old movies and all the rest of it,” he told the Film Festival attendees. “I knew, quite instinctively, that I needed to be a writer, a director, an actor. I would say to my dad, ‘look, I can act produce, I can do this, all this stuff. But how?’”
Noting that many creators have big dreams but lack knowledge of the most effective path to arrive there, Ameen detailed how he used his acting talent to open doors to exercise the rest of his skillset.
“My personal process wasn’t going to film school. It was becoming an actor,” he said. “I eventually moved to the United States in 2010 and I did a show called Harry’s Law. I would save the money I got from acting and put that into my own film…
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