Keivonn Woodard: TIME’s Kid of the Year list

WWhen Keivonn Woodard first appears as Sam Burrell in the fourth episode of HBO’s post-apocalyptic epic The last of us, he is holding a gun and gesturing for silence, raising a single finger to his lips. During the original 2023 run of the show’s first season, that seconds-long scene was enough for fans to spend the next week buzzing with anticipation of seeing more of Sam, an 8-year survivor of the show’s zombie fungus pandemic who, like the Keivonn himself is deaf.

“I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback,” Keivonn, now 11, tells TIME through an American Sign Language interpreter. “People were really looking forward to my second episode.”

Titled “Endure and Survive,” the next episode saw Sam and his older brother Henry (Lamar Johnson) team up with main characters Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) to try and escape a hostile quarantine zone. The episode became the highest-rated episode of the season on IMDb and established Keivonn as one of the show’s biggest breakout stars. “Everyone was telling me how moved they were by my performance,” he says. “They couldn’t believe I was actually deaf.”

Read more: How HBO’s The Last of Us tries to capture the video game’s complex morality

Although Keivonn only had one professional acting credit to his name before The last of us, The widespread acclaim generated by his portrayal of Sam came as no surprise to series co-creator Craig Mazin. “When [one of my shows] is up in the air, there are times when I sit there wondering, ‘How is this going to end?’ I’m nervous,” he says. “And there are times when I think, ‘I have something great that no one knows about.’ It was one Sunday night that I sat down and thought, ‘Wait until people see this kid. They’re going to lose their minds.’”

Making Sam Deaf in the TV version of The last of us it was a departure from the show’s video game source material, which Mazin says was born out of a desire to see more representation of people with disabilities on screen. “There are still areas of representation where Hollywood has completely failed,” he says. “Disability is something we’ve really struggled with.”

But it wasn’t exactly easy to find a black child actor, ages 8 to 12, who was deaf and fluent in American Sign Language or Black American Sign Language. Fortunately, after Keivonn’s mother, April Jackson-Woodard, sent in his audition video in response to a casting call for X, it quickly became clear that he was the one. “I don’t think I’ll ever be so lucky again,” says Mazin.

Last summer, Keivonn was “shocked” to learn he had been named for an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for his performance, making him the youngest actor to be recognized in the category and the first Black Deaf actor in the history of the Television Academy to secure a nomination. “When I saw my name and my face up on the screen,” he says, “it was like… ‘Wow.’”

Now, he will star in Anslem Richardson’s short film Fractal and is set to appear in Stephen Ashley Blake’s debut film, To steal. For Keivonn, these are all opportunities to continue making deaf people feel more seen. “Most people [in TV and film] they’re listening, so you just see people talking,” he says. “But when I see deaf people using sign language, I understand what they are saying. Showing deaf people playing deaf characters is authentic and extremely important.”