Edi Mūe Gathegi was born March 10, 1979. He is a Kenyan-American actor. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Gathegi grew up in Albany, California, U.S. Gathegi attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he played basketball until a knee injury ended his career. Gathegi then began taking acting classes. He then studied at New York University’s Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 2005. Gathegi’s career began in theatre and his stage credits include Two Trains Running at the Old Globe Theatre, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Cyrano de Bergerac, among others.
He appeared as recurring character Dr. Jeffrey Cole (aka “Big Love”) in the television series House, as Cheese in the 2007 film Gone Baby Gone, as Laurent in the films Twilight and its sequel The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and as Darwin in X-Men: First Class. He also featured in the AMC series, Into the Badlands, as Baron Jacobee. He has also been a recurring character in NBC’s television series, The Blacklist as Matias Solomon, an operative for a covert organization. Gathegi reprised the role in the 2016–2017 season crime thriller, The Blacklist: Redemption.
Gathegi’s first professional role was the Haitian Cabbie in the 2006 film Crank. Though he had originally auditioned for the role of Kaylo, the producers gave the role to Efren Ramirez and instead offered Gathegi an appearance as the Haitian Cabbie. He was skeptical at first about performing a Haitian accent, but was coached by a Haitian friend.
In 2007, after guest-starring on Lincoln Heights and Veronica Mars, Gathegi went on to star as Bodie in Death Sentence, Darudi in The Fifth Patient and Cheese in Gone Baby Gone. He later had a recurring role as Mormon intern Dr. Jeffrey Cole on the television medical drama House, his character was often mocked for his religious beliefs by Dr. House, who himself is an atheist.
He also guest-starred on CSI: Miami, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Life on Mars in 2008 before being cast as Laurent in Twilight. When Gathegi first auditioned for the 2008 film, adapted from the same-titled first book in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, he had not heard of the series and was not aware that his character was a vampire. He now has read the whole series and calls himself a hardcore fan. He portrays Eddie Willers in Atlas Shrugged (2011), based on Ayn Rand’s novel of the same name. He later portrayed another Haitian character, Jean Baptiste, in the fifth season of Justified, but was unhappy with the role and asked to be written off the show. He also portrays the character Ronald Dacey on StartUp.
Gathegi married Romanian Adriana Marinescu in 2018.
He has starred in many movies like Atlas shrugged where he played the role of Eddie Williers, Shiva and May where he played Dex. He also starred in This isn’t funny as Ryan, Aloha as Lt. Col. Curtis, Criminal activities as Marques, The watcher as Noah, Pimp as Kenny Wayne and many others.