Edi Gathegi

Edi Mūe Gathegi is a Kenyan-American actor known for his work across television, film, and theater. He first achieved widespread recognition for his recurring role as Dr. Jeffrey Cole on the medical drama series House. Over the course of his career, he has appeared in several high-profile film franchises, playing the vampire Laurent in the Twilight series and Darwin in X-Men: First Class, alongside leading and recurring television roles in series such as The Blacklist, StartUp, and For All Mankind.

Gathegi was born on March 10, 1979, in Nairobi, Kenya, and grew up in Albany, California. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he played basketball until a knee injury ended his athletic pursuits. Following the injury, he began taking acting classes and eventually attended New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 2005. Gathegi launched his acting career in the theater, appearing in stage productions such as Two Trains Running at the Old Globe Theatre, as well as classical works including Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and Cyrano de Bergerac.

His professional screen debut occurred in the 2006 film Crank, playing a Haitian cab driver after originally auditioning for a different character. In 2007, Gathegi landed television guest spots on Lincoln Heights and Veronica Mars, and featured in the films Death Sentence, The Fifth Patient, and Gone Baby Gone. That same year, he joined the fourth season of House as Dr. Jeffrey Cole, an intern frequently challenged regarding his religious beliefs.

Gathegi reached an international audience after being cast as Laurent in the 2008 film Twilight and its sequel The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Though unfamiliar with the original novels prior to his audition, he subsequently read the entire series and became an enthusiastic fan. His film career continued with portrayals of Eddie Willers in Atlas Shrugged and the superhero Darwin in X-Men: First Class in 2011. He also made appearances in television shows including CSI: Miami, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Life on Mars, and Justified.

Gathegi has maintained a steady television presence, taking on roles such as Baron Jacobee in Into the Badlands and Ronald Dacey in the drama series StartUp. He portrayed covert agent Matias Solomon in NBC's The Blacklist, later reprising the part in the spinoff series The Blacklist: Redemption. Beginning in 2022, he joined the cast of the Apple TV+ science fiction series For All Mankind as engineer and entrepreneur Dev Ayesa. In 2025, Gathegi appeared as Mister Terrific in the DC Universe feature film Superman.

In his personal life, Gathegi married Romanian dancer Adriana Marinescu in 2018.