Actress Rutina Wesley

Rutina Wesley is a young TV actress with two bona fide hit shows to her credit.

She first caught people's attention in 2007 as the vulnerable Tara Thornton in HBO's supernatural series "True Blood," a show revolving around vampire lore that explored contemporary social issues.  That same year, Ms. Wesley made her film debut as the main character in How She Move, as an aspiring dancer of Jamaican origin who enters a step-dancing competition to pay for her education.  The year before, she appeared in a 2006 production of Winter Miller's play In Darfur, about the troubled region in Sudan.

Today, Ms. Wesley stars in "Queen Sugar," a series produced by Oprah Winfrey and film director Ava DuVernay  that airs on Winfrey's eponymous cable TV channel.  Ms. Wesley plays Nova Bordelon, a New Orleans journalist originally from rural Louisiana with a sister who inherits their father's farm and a brother who's a single dad dealing with unemployment.  The series began its fifth season in September 2019.

With so much success on television already on her CV, Ms. Wesley is likely one of the few TV stars in this century who will have a third successful TV show in the future. :-)