For aspiring actors born and raised in rural localities, breaking into the television and film industry often means relocating to a major city where acting gigs are available.

Antonio Charity is among the few who have returned to their roots.

Charity recently moved back to his native Surry County after living and working in Los Angeles and New York for the past 30 years. His numerous on-screen credits include a mechanic in the 2018 “Bumblebee” installment in the Transformers film franchise, a sheriff in the 2022 Netflix romantic comedy “Falling for Christmas” that starred Lindsay Lohan, multiple episodes in AMC’s Emmy-nominated “A House Divided” soap opera and two episodes of Seth McFarlane’s Star Trek-inspired 2017-22 series “The Orville.”

“Growing up in Surry was amazing! I’ve always intended to come back here,” Charity said. “I want my daughter to have the experience of growing up in a smaller community surrounded by lots of family and friends everywhere she goes.”

Charity was born the youngest of the late Deacon James and Emily Charity’s 12 children and took an interest in the performing arts early in childhood.

“Based on stories from my older siblings, I’ve always been an entertainer,” Charity said. “I don’t remember my first experiences/performances, but they do. The first performance I remember is a Thanksgiving play in fifth grade.”

While still enrolled at Howard University’s College of Fine Arts, Charity booked his first television gig as a guest star on NBS’s “Homicide: Life on the Street.” After graduating in 1994 with his bachelor’s of fine arts in theatre, Charity moved home and worked for 10 months at Smithfield Foods’ meatpacking plant in Smithfield to finance his move to New York.

Coming from a county dominated by farmland with a population of roughly 6,500, life among New York’s skyscrapers and millions of inhabitants was a culture shock.

“New York and Los Angeles were, and still are, wild to me,” Charity said. “New York was very intimidating at first. I never liked living in either of those cities. I like small towns.”

His biography on the Internet Movie Database states he met his wife, Tige, originally of Baton Rouse, Louisiana, at a soul food restaurant in Harlem while she was vacationing. When the couple relocated to Los Angeles, Antonio started volunteering with Kids In The Spotlight, or KITS, a nonprofit Tige founded to allow children in the Los Angeles foster care system to write and star in their own short films.

Among his most recent filming projects, which is now in post-production editing, is a documentary he’s written and produced titled “Where Charity Began,” which tells the story of his family’s ties to the first Africans who arrived in Virginia in 1619.  His family has been living in Surry County since the 17th century.

Charity said his parents told him, and he’s been able to confirm through court records, that there were no records of people with the last name Charity ever having been enslaved.

“We’ve been ‘free,’ in quotation marks, since the 1600s,” Charity said. “I told my daughter that much and she asked why isn’t this known, and I didn’t have an answer for her.”

 

Life in Hollywood

Charity has more than one anecdote to tell from his decades in Hollywood.

Charity said he had just finished working a shift as an overnight security guard, and was still wearing his guard uniform, when he showed up to film a scene in the 2008 movie “Over Her Dead Body” starring Eva Longoria, in which he played an airport security guard.

“I just swapped uniforms,” Charity said.

Another time when he was living and working in New Jersey, he was volunteering in a mentorship program and was accompanied by a 12-year-old to a voiceover job for one of the Grand Theft Auto video games, when the producers decided on the spot they could also use a child’s voice and offered his mentee, Andrew, the part.

While on his way to an audition for the 2012-16 Showtime series “House of Lies,” he got lost on the filming lot and by chance encountered the show’s creator, Matthew Carnahan. A similar encounter happened again when he was driving for the ride-sharing service Lyft and gave a ride to “Get Shorty” director Adam Arkin and his wife.

“About three weeks later, I was on the show,” Charity said.

Charity said the alien “Kagus” on “The Orville” remains one of his favorite roles.

“It was a lot of freedom there. They allowed me to do what I wanted to do. … They told me to own the space,” Charity said.

Ahead of filming, the producers sent him to the show’s special effects department, where makeup artists made a mold of his face to create his alien appearance.

“One piece fit over my head like a hoodie. … It took about 45 minutes to put that stuff on,” Charity said.

Another of his favorite roles, though minor, was in “Something the Lord Made,” a 2004 made-for-TV biopic on Vivien Thomas, a Black man who taught himself medicine during the Great Depression and ended up teaching doctors at Johns Hopkins University and was posthumously awarded a medical degree.

It’s “one of those little-known Black history stories,” Charity said.

Charity still travels for gigs. He’s currently in Utah filming a Hallmark Christmas movie, Christmas on Duty,” and will return temporarily to Los Angeles in May to shoot a feature-length version of “Shot by an Angel,” a short film he starred in about seven years ago in which he plays a pastor who loses his faith after losing his wife and the ability to walk.

Since returning to Surry, he’s begun teaching acting classes at Main Street Baptist Church in Smithfield. The classes are 6-7 p.m. for youth and 7:30-9 p.m. for adults every Tuesday except when he’s away filming.