Imani Lewis, the actress a cancelled Netflix show launched into 60 countries

Imani Lewis

Photo: Everwest / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 12, 1999 New York City, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Eighth Grade, Vampires vs. the Bronx, The Forty-Year-Old Version

The summer First Kill disappeared from Netflix, Imani Lewis was already partway through its global run. The supernatural teen series — eight episodes, one season, decisive cancellation — had landed in the Top 10 in more than sixty countries during its brief window. The network’s internal metrics and the audience’s behavior told entirely different stories. Lewis played Calliope Burns, a teenager from a family of monster hunters, with the kind of physical commitment that suggests someone who has been thinking about a role longer than the production allowed. She had trained in kickboxing for years before the role existed.

She was born on April 12, 1999 in New York City, and her introduction to genre storytelling came through television early. Sabrina the Teenage Witch was her childhood reference point for how supernatural worlds could operate with domestic logic; Wesley Snipes in Blade gave her the blueprint for what a monster-fighter looks like when the camp is stripped away and only the consequence remains. Her screen debut came in The Get Down in 2017, followed by a recurring slot on Star and guest appearances on Wu-Tang: An American Saga and Alternatino with Arturo Castro before landing her first substantial film work.

The turn toward more significant work arrived in 2020 with a cluster of simultaneous projects. Vampires vs. the Bronx cast her as Gloria in a Netflix horror-comedy that fused genre mechanics with genuine neighborhood specificity. The same year she began work on Hightown, the Starz crime drama set against Cape Cod’s opioid epidemic, playing Charmaine across three seasons and sixteen episodes through 2024. The role demanded a different register entirely: lower temperature, denser moral fog. In the series’ final season, Charmaine returned with sharpened purpose, partnering again with Osito in a reclamation arc the writers had been building since the beginning.

Then came First Kill. Lewis and Sarah Catherine Hook played two teenagers whose romance required one of them to kill the other — one a vampire, one a hunter — in a series that embedded queer representation inside genre conventions rather than placing it alongside them. Netflix’s own data confirmed global success: sixty countries, Top 10 positioning. Netflix cancelled the series anyway after a single season. The fan response — organized, sustained, and still active years after the cancellation — brought more international attention to Lewis than a quiet second season might have. Whether the show was ended on its merits, or because Netflix’s renewal calculus doesn’t weight global-resonance metrics against territory-by-territory return projections, remains an open question. What isn’t open is the audience’s verdict.

Ricky, directed by Rashad Frett and awarded the Sundance Directing Award at its January 2025 premiere, gave Lewis a quieter assignment: Jaz, a woman whose connection to a newly released former prisoner is built through small acts of recognition rather than dramatic confrontation. Stephan James played the title role alongside Sheryl Lee Ralph. The film reached wider audiences in April 2026.

Two announced projects extend the range in different directions. Pure, from first-time feature director Natalie Jasmine Harris, casts Lewis as Celeste, a seventeen-year-old slam poetry prodigy navigating Black cotillion culture in suburban Maryland — material with no genre logic she has inhabited before. Killa, a horror-drama marking Laci Dent’s feature debut, places her as Asa Jones, a Louisiana teenager pursuing a college basketball scholarship who begins to lose herself to something that registers as neither sport nor circumstance. She shares the film with Tanya Wright.

Lewis is not constructing a campaign to revive what Netflix cancelled, nor returning to the franchise territory that gave her name its reach. With Pure and Killa in development and Ricky‘s distribution still unfolding, she is building toward something that doesn’t require a renewal announcement to exist. The sixty countries that found her in eight episodes have other opportunities to update their read.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Imani Lewis, Sarah Catherine Hook, First Kill, Hightown

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