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Kat Graham Makes History as the First Black April O’Neil in Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

A handful of famous folks will head down into the sewers and munch on some pizza: Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has found its heroic reptile brothers.

The Nickelodeon animated series about a quartet of crime-fighting brothers with about-to-be-explored ninja powers has tapped Omar Miller (Ballers) as the oldest sibling/ringleader Raphael, Ben Schwartz (Parks and Recreation) as the charming Leonardo, Josh Brener (Silicon Valley) as tech whiz Donatello, Brandon Mychal Smith (You’re The Worst) as the skateboarding artist Michelangelo, and Kat Graham (The Vampire Diaries) as their human friend April O’Neil. Graham will voice the first African-American April.

The series, which will debut next year with 26 episodes, chronicles the exploits of the turtle brothers as “they encounter new allies and villains and discover a mystical world they never knew existed beneath the streets of New York City.”

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise began as a comic book series in the ’80s before expanding to film, TV, and video games. In 2012, Nickelodeon debuted a computer-animated series, simply titled Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that ran for five seasons, and in 2014, Transformers’ Michael Bay brought the franchise to the big screen with a film starring Will Arnett and Megan Fox. The two actors then reprised their roles in the 2016 sequel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows.