Beulah Koale

Samoan Kiwi Beulah Koale first discovered acting as a way to skip classes, then appeared in short films Manurewa and Suni Man. After doing a guest spot on Shortland Street in 2012, he won a recurring role. In 2014 Koale starred in big screen crime drama The Last Saint, as a young man who becomes a drug courier to help his family. He followed it with post-apocalyptic TV series The Cul De Sac, then won acclaim for film Thank You for Your Service, in which he played an American Samoan soldier struggling to adapt to life after fighting in Iraq. Two years later he joined the team of cops on long-running series Hawaii-Five-O.

I did television and film and theatre in New Zealand. I thought that was as big as I was going to get. I never even tried to learn how to do an American accent because I thought there was no way people in America would hire someone like me. Then it happened, and I had to learn it very quickly. Beulah Koale in The Los Angeles Times, 25 October 2017