Do we like Yaphet Kotto?
Our score: 5 out of 10. A decent working life with nothing nasty on the record, set against late-life social media posts that reportedly drifted into QAnon-linked content and COVID dismissal.
Yaphet Kotto was born in New York in 1939 and raised in the Bronx. His father was a Cameroonian immigrant who had converted to Judaism, and his mother was a nurse who was Jewish before he was born. He said he was picked on as a kid for being one of the few Jews in the neighbourhood, and that he'd have become a rabbi if acting hadn't got him first.
Acting did get him. He became the first Black Bond villain as Dr Kananga in Live and Let Die, played the engineer Parker in Alien, and later anchored Homicide: Life on the Street as Lieutenant Al Giardello. The Chicago Tribune's critic argued Hollywood denied actors like him far more than it gave, and he never landed an Oscar nomination despite the work.
Scandal-wise, the record is quiet. Searches turned up no lawsuits, convictions or credible allegations against him, and the only on-set story that surfaced was his own: that he deliberately wound up a co-star to build tension on screen. That's honestly the whole list.
The harm check is where it gets messy. In 2015 he told the Big Issue that “James Bond cannot be black”, arguing Black actors should create new heroes rather than take roles written as white. That's a contested opinion about casting, not an attack on anyone, and he'd have been right at home arguing it in a pub.
The bigger flag is his last year or so. JTA reported that he claimed to have been abducted by aliens, dismissed the danger of COVID-19, shared content associated with QAnon, and in 2020 endorsed both Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump. The sourcing is thin and secondhand, so we're calling it mixed rather than a fail: no campaign against anyone's rights turned up, but the conspiracy slide is the pattern the page watches for.
On the good side, the work speaks for itself. He's remembered by the industry for a quiet strength on screen, and his proud Jewish identity was a visible part of his public story as one of the first Black Jews on screen. We found no documented charity work, so we won't invent any.