Canadian actor-brothers Shamier Anderson (John Wick 4) and Stephan James (If Beale Street Could Talk) had their stars unveiled on Scarborough’s Walk of Fame. The men were raised in the marginalized Toronto community by a single mother who emigrated to Canada from Jamaica.
“It’s really humbling and flattering to receive something like this in my hometown, at a mall where I grew up, where I shopped, it’s pretty cool,” Anderson told The Hollywood Reporter.
The local Walk of Fame honor for the fast-rising Hollywood stars is more than an exercise in collective positive thinking for an inner-city neighborhood that earlier brought to the world celebrities like Mike Myers, Jim Carrey and The Weeknd.
The brothers are at work via their Bay Mills Studios production banner — named after the community housing project they grew up in Scarborough — on a landmark TV drama set in the inner-city community that is their home away from Hollywood. Anderson is keeping the drama’s storyline close to his vest, but the untitled project is part of a mandate at Bay Mills Studios to showcase diverse stories in original TV projects via a first-look deal with Boat Rocker Studios.
“Why this has taken so much time is because we want to ensure that it’s done authentically, that it’s done with the right voices, and it’s done at the best budget points to ensure we’re highlighting every aspect of Scarborough,” he explains. The neighborhood includes the major east-west Sheppard Avenue in Toronto’s eastside suburb.
The hot TV property is being circled by local broadcasters and the Canadian arms of U.S. streamers like Netflix, Paramount+ and Prime Video as Anderson and James look to do for Scarborough what Spike Lee did for his beloved Brooklyn and Billy Wilder did with old Hollywood. “Who is going to step up and say this marginalized community is important enough, that there really is a story and there’s a narrative here that can resonate with a large part of the country?” James challenges.
Scarborough has already begun to get its moment in the sun, including with Clement Virgo’s 2022 feature film Brother. The mystery drama followed three intertwining timelines about Francis and Michael, sons of Caribbean immigrants who grow up in an embattled Toronto housing complex during a summer of police violence and dashed dreams in 1991. That was preceded by the 2021 drama Scarborough, where directors Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson adapted the novel by Catherine Hernandez about three low-income families in the inner-city community.
Otherwise, Scarborough has mostly provided a backdrop for Hollywood movies that are shot locally, like Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and Pacific Rim, The Incredible Hulk, and Resident Evil: Afterlife. In an earlier bid to amplify Black voices in Toronto, Anderson and James launched the Black Academy, which started out with the annual B.L.A.C.K. Ball party at the Toronto Film Festival.
The celebration eventually became the Legacy Awards, a Canadian awards show honoring Black emerging and established talent that aired on the CBC, the country’s public broadcaster.
After John Wick 4, in which Anderson played a tracker trying to assassinate Keanu Reeves, he appeared in Simon Kinberg’s Invasion for Apple TV+, Mo McRae’s A Lot of Nothing and Brad Furman’s Tin Soldier. James played Olympics hero Jesse Owens in Race, Alonzo ‘Fonny’ Hunt in Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk and John Lewis in Ava Duvernay’s Selma. He also starred as Walter Cruz opposite Julia Roberts in Amazon Prime’s Homecoming and appeared in Zak Penn’s sci-fi series Beacon 23.
James credits his mother for their success above everything else. “First and foremost, our mom, a single mother who raised three young Black boys in metro housing and gave us the chance to believe the world was bigger than Scarborough, bigger than the four walls of our apartment, and that gave us the inspiration that we could take it somewhere else,” he added.
But he also expresses frustration that Canadian actors and other homegrown talent too often feel a need to climb the ranks in Hollywood before they reach a summit in Canada. “We’re a little bit victims of that, but I think the way that we’re trying to turn the tide and break that sort of generational curse is by saying we’re doing work in the States and around the world. Yes, we do have homes in Los Angeles,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t come back and invest in our communities and give people a reason to be proud, a reason to be hopeful for their own success and to have it travel across the world.”
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