Actor Emilio Evans celebrates Jamaican roots

Actor Emilio Evans, co-star of the TV series Makeup and Breakup (aka Makeup X Breakup), will return to the screen, starting July 6, when the half-hour drama premieres its second season on the popular streaming platform Allblk.tv (All Black TV).

Set in New York City, the series is written and directed by series creator Eric Dickens, and follows the complicated romantic relationships of a group of young African American friends with their present and former lovers. The ensemble cast also features Nicolette Ellis, Omar Salmon, Kamel Goffin, Olivia Gray, Karmie Berry and Sean Dominic.

Evans, a Harlem-based actor of Jamaican parentage, plays the role of Bryce Grove, a marketing executive who has gone through hardships in his life and “can be pretty naïve and aloof in his approach to, and relationships with women, and consequently things don’t always go well for him in his dating world”.

Evans is proud of the years-long journey the series has taken before arriving at its new home on Allblk, which is a subsidiary of AMC Networks. Responding to an open casting call back in 2016, his audition led to him becoming an original cast member when the show premiered later that year on YouTube as a series of 10-minute episodes. The popularity of the series led to a pickup by BET for their online streaming platform and ultimately, a new home at Allblk as of 2022.

Season two, he says, will be interesting because it is actually a ‘prequel’ to season one, meaning audiences will be reintroduced to the show’s characters at a younger age, prior to how they were presented in the first season. “Audiences can expect to see some really great storytelling with people of colour as the focus, and that’s very exciting for me, based on what my own plans are for the future.”

Ultimately, Evans, who decided to become an actor at age seven to get over his shyness, and who later studied theatre at Borough of Manhattan Community College, intends to establish his own production company. He hopes to write, produce and appear in content that will create more opportunities for artists of colour and bring his Jamaican roots fully to the fore.

“My mother is from Tivoli Gardens and my father is from Portland,” he shared. “They immigrated here quite young, so I was born in New York and raised mostly in the deeply Jamaican part of the Bronx. But [I] am still very close to my large family back in Jamaica. I’m very proud of my Jamaican heritage and would love to give Jamaicans another reason to be proud by telling some of our own stories. We haven’t truly tapped the full potential of Jamaicans and Jamaican stories on TV or film in an interesting way just yet. I’m definitely hoping to change that, though.”

Evans, who has also appeared on Power: Book Two and Law and Order: Organized Crime, was last seen on stage in BREAKZ at the Nimbus Arts Center in New Jersey.