Aquaman 2: Who Is Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Black Manta’s Translator?

After grossing $1.15 billion worldwide in 2018, Aquaman returns to screens at the end of the year with a new adventure called Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. And since you don’t change the winning team, James Wan is back at the helm of this sequel, with Jason Momoa, Patrick Wilson, Amber Heard and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in front of the camera.

The latter plays David Cain, aka Black Manta, who is out for revenge after his father’s death in the previous episode. And if you don’t remember the first movie, we recap it here! Black Manta is now the big bad of this opus, to the point where Aquaman has to ally with his half-brother and former rival, Orm, to fight him.

revealed by Baz Luhrmann

And if you’re wondering where you might have seen Yahya Abdul-Mateen II before, it might have been in The Get Down, which featured him in 2016. In this Netflix series by Baz Luhrmann, he plays Prince of Disco Clarence. “Caldwell.

Then comes his first film Sidney Hall, which was presented at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in 2017. That same year, he donned a police uniform opposite Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron in Baywatch: Baywatch. He also finds the latter in full bloom in The Greatest Showman.

Entering the DCU

We see her briefly in Jordan Peele’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Black Mirror and Us. 2018 has been a rich year for the actor, who has crossed genres with the road movie Boundaries, the disturbing My First Fight and of course the blockbuster Aquaman. His involvement in the DC universe continues with Watchmen, based on Alan Moore’s comics, by Damon Lindelof for HBO. He plays Cal, the husband of Angela Abar (Regina King), aka “Sister Night,” a masked vigilante in the Seventh Cavalry’s war against white supremacy.

A true rising star, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II landed two flagship pop culture roles in 2021: Candyman in the Nia DaCosta remake and Morpheus in The Matrix Resurrections, replacing Laurence Fishburne. However, the two plays met with mixed success. The following year, he co-starred with Jake Gyllenhaal in Michael Bay’s spectacular Emergency.

And while we can currently see him opposite Aquaman in theaters, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II isn’t done with superheroes: we’ll soon see him in the Wonder Man series, this time under the Marvel banner.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, in theaters now.