Is it true that Boris Kodjoe, who played Damon Carter on the series Soul Food and now stars on NBC’s Undercovers, was once on track to be a professional tennis player?
—Dean Kaminsky, Youngstown, Ohio
Austrian-born Kodjoe, 37, came to the United States in 1992 on a scholarship to play tennis for Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, but a back injury cut short his aspirations to go pro. So he turned to modeling and then acting. He’s perfected his American accent—he also speaks German, French and a little Spanish—but says the hardest part was learning the colloquialisms. “My English was so bad [when I moved here] that somebody said, ‘What’s up?’ and I looked up. Literally, I had no idea what was going on.