Boris Frederic Cecil Tay-Natey Ofuatey-Kodjoe (/ˈkoʊdʒuː/; born March 8, 1973), better known as Boris Kodjoe, is an Austrian-born actor of German and Ghanaian descent known for his roles as Kelby in the 2002 film Brown Sugar, the sports-courier agent Damon Carter on the Showtime drama series Soul Food and was a recurring character on FOX's The Last Man on Earth. He currently co-stars on BET's Real Husbands of Hollywood and on the CBS medical drama Code Black.
Kodjoe was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of Ursula, a German psychologist of partially Jewish descent, and Eric Kodjoe, a Ghanaian physician who is of the Krobo people. His namesake is the Russian poet and writer Boris Pasternak. Kodjoe's matrilineal great-grandmother was Jewish and died in the Holocaust; his maternal grandmother survived the war in hiding. Kodjoe's parents divorced when he was six years old. He grew up in the vicinity of Freiburg im Breisgau. Kodjoe is fluent in German, English, and French, and speaks some Spanish. He has a brother named Patrick and two sisters named Nadja and Lara.