Danielle Brooks

Danielle Brooks (birthname: Danielle Brittany Brooks) is best known as Tasha on the long-running Netflix series, Orange is the New Black (2013-2019), but has carefully built theatrical and feature film careers during this period, particularly with indie writer-directors.

Soon after her first appearance as Tasha, Brooks was cast by writer-director Oren Moverman for a supporting role in Time Out of Mind (2014), starring Richard Gere, Ben Vereen, Jena Malone, Kyra Sedgwick, and Steve Buscemi. Brooks’s first major film role was in writer-director Katie Cokinos’s coming-of-age comedy-drama, I Dream Too Much (2015), with Eden Brolin and Diane Ladd, which premiered at the South by Southwest film festival.

In her first voice role in an animated movie, Danielle Brooks joined the ensemble of Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Kate McKinnon, Sean Penn, Keegan-Michael Key, Bill Hader, and Peter Dinklage, for the Finnish-based Rovio Animation and Sony Pictures Imageworks production of The Angry Birds Movie (2016), grossing $352 million.

Brooks took on a major supporting role in writer-director Megan Griffiths’s drama, Sadie (2018), with Sophia Mitri Schloss, Melanie Lynskey, Tony Hale, and John Gallagher Jr., earning critical acclaim after its premiere at the South by Southwest film festival. Writer-director Chinonye Chukwu cast Brooks for a major role in his drama, Clemency (2019), starring Alfre Woodard, Richard Schiff, Wendell Pierce, and Aldis Hodge, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival before getting three Independent Spirit award nominations and a release by Neon.

In yet another major supporting role for an auteur filmmaker, Brooks was in the cast of co-writer/director Chris Morris’s U.K./U.S./Australian comedy, The Day Shall Come (2019), with Marchant Davis, Anna Kendrick, Kayvan Novak, Denis O’Hare, and Jim Gaffigan.

After co-starring with Elizabeth Marvel in the gun drama, All the Little Things We Kill (2019), Danielle Brooks co-starred in the Canadian comedy, Eat Wheaties! (2020), from producer/writer/director Scott Abramovitch, with Tony Hale, Paul Walter Hauser, and Elisha Cuthbert, and released by Screen Media Films.

Brooks re-created the role of Sofia, which she first performed (and Tony-nominated) on Broadway, for the Blitz Bazawule-directed screen version of the musical version of Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple (2023), with the cast of Taraji P. Henson, Fantasia Barrino, Colman Domingo, Corey Hawkins, H.E.R., Halle Bailey, Louis Gossett Jr., Jon Batiste, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and released by Warner Bros.

In her first big-budget genre movie, Brooks co-starred with Emma Myers and Jason Momoa in the highly anticipated Jared Hess-directed big-screen version of the video game, Minecraft (2025), produced by Warner Bros., Warner Bros. Animation and Mojang as a U.S./Swedish/British co-production.