Ask AP: Boris Kodjoe

Celebrities, Celebrity Q&A, People
on October 14, 2010

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.