From classical theatre and Hotel Rwanda to Black Sails, voice work and his latest turn as Sipho in Average Joe, Hakeem Kae-Kazim has spent decades proving that the most interesting characters are rarely the easiest ones to explain.
There is something reassuring about speaking with an actor who has already accomplished enough that the conversation does not need to become an exercise in proving anything.
Hakeem Kae-Kazim has worked across continents, genres and generations of entertainment. His résumé stretches from classical theatre to major studio films, prestige dramas, television, animation, video games and some of the most recognizable productions of the last several decades. Yet when we spoke for New Hollywood Magazine, what struck me was not the weight of all those credits. It was how much curiosity he still carries into the work.
He still talks about acting like someone who loves being an actor.
That sounds simple until you consider how long he has been doing it.
Our conversation began across a nine-hour time difference, with Hakeem speaking from South Africa while I joined from Los Angeles. Somewhere between joking about jet lag and trying not to butcher his name (which I got on the first try), we settled into the kind of conversation that reminded me why I enjoy interviewing people who have truly lived inside their craft.
Hakeem was warm, funny, thoughtful and incredibly generous with his perspective. More importantly, he never spoke about his career as though longevity had made him indifferent to it. When he talked about walking onto a set, there was still gratitude in his voice.
“I love what I do so much. I love being an actor.”
For somebody whose professional life has already taken him through England, South Africa, Los Angeles and countless fictional worlds in between, that may be one of the most telling things he could have said.
Finding the Humanity in Sipho
Hakeem can currently be seen in Season 2 of Paramount+’s Average Joe, where he plays Sipho, a powerful Cape Town crime figure who becomes part of an already complicated world surrounding Joe Washington (played by Deon Cole).
It would have been easy to approach Sipho as another intimidating antagonist. Hakeem, unsurprisingly, was interested in something more difficult.
Before stepping into the character, he began looking at the experiences that might have created him. There were details about Sipho’s earlier life that helped Hakeem understand how a person could arrive at a place where terrible behavior still made sense to the person committing it.
That distinction matters enormously in performance.
Hakeem was not interested in asking the audience to excuse Sipho. He was interested in understanding him.
“I was trying to give him an inner life,” he explained while describing the process of building the character.
As we continued talking, it became clear that this is central to how Hakeem approaches acting. He does not seem particularly interested in dividing people neatly into good and bad, powerful and weak, hero and villain. He wants to know what happened before the audience met them.
With Sipho, even the character’s sense of authority has a history. Hakeem explained that something from Sipho’s childhood contributed to his belief that his power had been bestowed upon him by something larger than himself. In Sipho’s mind, that authority carries an almost divine dimension.
Suddenly, the character is no longer simply a man with money, influence and people willing to do what he says. He becomes a man whose understanding of himself has been shaped by his own mythology.
That is a much richer place for an actor to work.
A Career Built on Looking Deeper
When I asked Hakeem how he creates authority without making a performance feel oversized, he talked about research, subtlety and understanding the life of the person he is playing.
If an actor understands enough about the character, he explained, some of that internal work eventually reveals itself without needing to be announced. It can appear in how the person stands, enters a room, responds to somebody else or chooses not to respond at all.
“You may see one side of his humanity and not another side of his humanity, but he’s as human as possible.”
There is a tremendous amount of grace in allowing a character to remain complicated.
Earlier in his career, Hakeem spent significant time in theatre, including work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. He credits that background with helping him learn how to search for the quieter details inside a role and understand why a character behaves the way he does.
Theatre gave him one education. Life gave him another.
Travel, observation and simply getting older have all contributed to the way he now thinks about people. He spoke about paying attention to the human condition and recognizing that behavior almost never has one clean explanation.
Then he gave me what I think is the thesis of our entire conversation.
That idea runs through nearly everything Hakeem spoke about, whether the subject was acting, Africa, television or his own career.
Letting Cape Town Be Cape Town
One of the biggest changes in Average Joe Season 2 is the move to Cape Town, which gives the series a completely different cultural landscape to work within.
Hakeem was especially pleased that the production did not simply use South Africa as an attractive location pretending to be somewhere else.
“They use Africa as Africa, not as a pseudo New York or whatever.”
That comment led us into a much larger conversation about what it means to allow a place to actually be itself on screen.
For Hakeem, the value of bringing Average Joe to Cape Town is that the series embraces the culture, the food, the physical landscape, the beauty and the less glamorous realities that exist alongside it. He appreciated seeing the city presented with enough range to include both its polished surfaces and its rougher edges.
There is something quietly important about that.
For a long time, African locations in international entertainment have often been expected to perform a function. They become shorthand for poverty, danger, wilderness, political instability or an undefined exoticism that treats an entire continent as though it were one place.
Hakeem is interested in something much richer.
He wants specificity.
He wants audiences to understand that African stories can exist with the same contradictions, genres, humor, glamour, violence, romance, ambition and complexity afforded to stories set anywhere else.
Average Joe gives Cape Town enough space to become part of the story rather than merely the background behind it.
Hakeem also pointed out that the decision makes sense in a world where people increasingly live across borders.
“We travel. We’re global citizens, because the world’s a small place now.”
A story does not stop being American simply because its characters leave America. If anything, seeing them navigate another culture can tell us even more about who they are.
Working Opposite Deon Cole
Hakeem speaks about his colleagues with the same generosity he brings to his own work.
That became especially apparent when we talked about Deon Cole.
The tonal balance of Average Joe is unusual because the series frequently places humor beside circumstances that are genuinely dangerous. Cole brings his own comedic instinct into that world, while Hakeem arrives as one of the season’s more formidable sources of tension.
Hakeem described working with Cole as easy and enjoyable, praising his comic timing while also making a point of describing the man behind the performance.
He called him gracious, open and without the kind of ego that can make collaboration difficult. He also shared a small story about Cole recording a TikTok video for Hakeem’s daughter, something she was thrilled to receive.
It was a small detail, but I liked that Hakeem remembered it.
After decades in this business, the résumé matters, but people also remember who was kind.
There is plenty of danger surrounding Sipho on screen, yet the environment Hakeem described behind the scenes sounded generous and collaborative. That ease between actors likely helps the show move so comfortably between violence, tension and humor without any one of those tones overwhelming the others.
Hakeem believes that mixture is part of what makes Average Joe distinctive, particularly as a Black centered series that allows its characters and its tone to move beyond one expectation.
Yes, We Had to Talk About the Voice
At some point, I had to address the obvious.
Hakeem Kae-Kazim has one of those voices.
I told him he could probably read a parking validation and somehow make it sound like an international threat.
Fortunately, he laughed.
But behind the joke is another serious part of his career. Hakeem has worked extensively in voice acting across games, animation, television and film, and he approaches that medium as a craft unto itself.
Without the visual tools available in an on-camera performance, the voice has to carry an entirely different level of responsibility. Hakeem spoke about experimenting with texture and using the voice as an instrument rather than simply reading dialogue into a microphone.
“To play around with the different textures of your voice is a really wonderful thing to be able to do.”
What I appreciate about his career is that he has never allowed one strength to become the boundary of what he is permitted to do.
He has moved between stage and screen, physical performance and voice work, African productions and Hollywood productions, historical drama and genre entertainment without needing every chapter to resemble the one before it.
That range deserves its flowers.
Looking Back Without Living There
During our conversation, I started listing pieces of Hakeem’s career back to him.
Theatre. Film. Television. Voice work. African productions. British productions. American productions. Historical dramas. Pirates. Superheroes. Thrillers.
Sometimes somebody has accomplished so much that the résumé starts sounding more extraordinary to everybody else than it does to the person who lived it.
I wanted him to hear it.
There is nothing arrogant about acknowledging the distance you have traveled.
At this stage of his career, however, Hakeem is not choosing roles based solely on prestige. He still needs something in the character that gives him room to investigate.
The writing matters. The intelligence of the script matters. The director can matter. Most importantly, the character has to contain enough dimension for him to find a way inside.
“I have to find a character interesting. I have to be able to find a way into him and try and give him some depth and breadth and humanity.”
That is a remarkable thing to hear from somebody who could reasonably spend the rest of his career relying on what he already knows works.
Instead, Hakeem still wants to be challenged.
He spoke about wanting to explore even more psychologically complicated characters, particularly African men whose lives are allowed to exist beyond familiar archetypes. He wants characters whose psychology, culture, contradictions and histories are not immediately obvious to the audience.
It is not simply about creating more roles for African actors.
It is about creating better ones.
Hotel Rwanda and What We Still Have to Learn
One of the most thoughtful moments in our conversation came when we discussed Hotel Rwanda.
For many actors, looking back at a film that became an important part of their international career might lead naturally toward memories of opportunity or recognition.
Hakeem went somewhere else.
He talked about knowledge.
At the time, he had been living in South Africa during a historic period of political transformation. The emergence of a new South Africa commanded enormous attention, while elsewhere on the continent Rwanda was experiencing genocide.
Working on Hotel Rwanda forced Hakeem to confront how little he himself had understood about what had been happening.
He did not try to soften that realization.
“There’s a lot to learn about our continent. There’s a lot to learn about the nuances of our continent.”
I respected that answer tremendously.
There is humility in admitting that proximity does not automatically equal understanding.
There is also something important in hearing an African artist acknowledge that Africa itself is too vast, culturally and historically, for any one person to understand completely.
That is perhaps the larger argument behind so much of what Hakeem wants from storytelling now.
The answer to stereotypes is not simply better publicity.
It is depth.
It is allowing different parts of the continent to remain different.
It is refusing the temptation to turn African identity into one easily marketable image, even when that image is meant to be positive.
Complexity is not the obstacle.
Complexity is the point.
Giving Hakeem His Flowers
By the time our conversation ended, what stayed with me most was not any single credit or career milestone. It was the way Hakeem Kae-Kazim still speaks about acting with the curiosity of someone who has not allowed success to make the work feel ordinary.
There is a quiet confidence in him that feels earned. It comes from decades of experience, certainly, but also from knowing that experience does not mean there is nothing left to discover. His career has taken him through classical theatre, major films, television, voice work and productions across multiple continents, yet he still approaches a character by asking the same fundamental questions about humanity, motivation and truth.
That is what made this conversation feel so generous.
Hakeem could have spent our time simply looking backward at everything he has already accomplished. Instead, he spoke about the characters he still hopes to play, the complexity he still wants to explore and the kinds of African stories he believes deserve more space on the world stage. He spoke about his collaborators with warmth, about his craft with genuine affection, and about walking onto a set with the kind of gratitude that can easily disappear when something becomes your profession.
There is something beautiful about hearing an artist with this much history still sound excited about the possibilities ahead.
Hakeem Kae-Kazim has already built a body of work that has introduced audiences around the world to characters across cultures, genres and generations. His longevity is impressive, but longevity by itself is not what makes a career meaningful. What matters is what an artist continues to bring with them as the years accumulate.
In Hakeem’s case, there is still curiosity. There is still discipline. There is still an interest in people complicated enough that they cannot be explained in one sentence. There is still a desire to see African characters written with the same depth, contradiction and humanity afforded to anyone else.
And there is still joy.
Part of what I want New Hollywood Magazine to do is make room for moments like this, where we are not waiting for a retrospective or an award ceremony to acknowledge someone who has spent years contributing to the culture. Sometimes giving someone their flowers simply means stopping long enough to recognize the consistency, generosity and craft that have been there all along.
Hakeem has earned those flowers many times over.
What I appreciated most was that he never seemed to be asking for them.
He was simply talking about the work he loves, the stories he still wants to tell and the people he still hopes to understand a little better through it.
After everything he has already accomplished, Hakeem Kae-Kazim is still looking forward.
That may be one of the most graceful accomplishments of all.
Hakeem Kae-Kazim can currently be seen as Sipho in Season 2 of Average Joe on Paramount+.
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