Nelsan Ellis

Nelsan Ellis was an American actor, born in Harvey, Illinois in 1977 and trained at the Juilliard School, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2004. He became widely known for playing Lafayette Reynolds, the short-order cook and drug dealer, in the HBO series True Blood from 2008 to 2014, a role that won him a Satellite Award from the International Press Academy. He later starred as Shinwell Johnson in the series Elementary. On the big screen he played Eddie Sweat in Secretariat, Martin Luther King Jr. in Lee Daniels' The Butler and Bobby Byrd in the James Brown biopic Get on Up. He died in Brooklyn in 2017, and his final acting role, in True to the Game, was released after his death.