From actors to executives, this ethnic group is conquering Tinseltown like it’s conquered medicine and entrepreneurship. Sam Adegoke loved acting out scenes from the Bible at church as a kid. But for two decades, that’s as far as his acting career went. Born in Lagos, Nigeria, and brought up in St. Paul and Mounds View, Minnesota, Adegoke — like many Nigerian-Americans — felt pressured to choose a secure career path. He got a business degree and a marketing job after college. But when his company relocated him to Los Angeles, he took the opportunity to start going on auditions and gradually became serious about a career change. Then in 2015, Adegoke won the third annual ABC Discovers: Digital Talent Competition, and the offers started coming in: He currently stars as Jeff Colby on the CW’s Dynasty reboot. It’s the kind of leading role Black actors have long struggled to land in Hollywood. In the original Dynasty, Colby’s character was white. But the industry, criticized for a lack of diversity, is slowly starting to respond — even if only reluctantly. In the 700 top-grossing Hollywood films between 2007 and 2014, the proportion of white actors fell from 77.6 percent in 2007 to 73.1 percent in 2014, according to a 2015 study by the University of Southern California. The percentage of Black actors, just 10.3 percent as recently as 2010, was 12.5 percent in 2014. And while there’s no credible breakdown of actors by countries of origin, the growing success of actors of Nigerian descent is such that, on occasions, they’re even seen as usurpers by other Black actors with longer family histories in America. | 
