Every awards season carries its own quiet thunder alongside the headline noise. While familiar names and franchise favourites dominate conversations in the lead-up to the 12th Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards, a handful of performers are stepping onto the continent’s most prestigious film and television stage for the very first time. The nominations for the ceremony, announced live on Africa Magic channels on March 29, 2026, and hosted by Chimezie Imo, feature eleven acting nominees receiving their first-ever AMVCA nods. Their stories are as varied as the performances that got them here.
The 12th AMVCA holds on May 9, 2026, in Lagos, with veteran actress Joke Silva serving as Head Judge, succeeding filmmaker Femi Odugbemi. The edition features 32 categories across 18 jury-voted awards, 11 audience-voted categories, and three special recognition honours. It is within this expanded and increasingly scrutinised framework that the eleven first-timers find themselves competing against some of the most established names in African cinema.
William Benson (Best Lead Actor, To Kill A Monkey)
If there is a single performance from 2025 that the broader Nollywood conversation kept returning to, it is William Benson’s turn as Efemini in Kemi Adetiba’s To Kill A Monkey. The Netflix series, created, written, directed, and produced by Adetiba under the Kemi Adetiba Visuals banner, held the number one spot on Netflix upon release and became one of the most talked-about Nigerian productions of the year. Efemini is a brilliant but desperate tech graduate in Lagos, drawn into a dangerous cybercrime syndicate by an old friend, with a detective closing in on him from the other side. Benson anchors the character’s internal collapse with a restraint that makes every scene feel earned rather than performed. His Best Lead Actor nomination at the 12th AMVCA is his first at the awards, placing him in the company of Lateef Adedimeji, Uzor Arukwe, Femi Branch, Wale Ojo, and Kanayo O. Kanayo.
Khumbuza Meyiwa (Best Lead Actor, Bet I Love You)
The AMVCA has been expanding its continental reach with intention in recent years, and Khumbuza Meyiwa’s presence in the Best Lead Actor category reflects that vision in action. The South African actor earned his first-ever AMVCA nomination for his lead role in Bet I Love You, a film that had its world premiere at the 2025 Joburg Film Festival before finding its audience on Showmax. The recognition places a spotlight on a performance that crossed borders and earned enough critical regard to land within one of the most competitive acting categories in the 12th edition.
Ifeoma Fafunwa (Best Lead Actress, The Lost Days)
Of all the first-time acting nominees, Ifeoma Fafunwa’s story carries perhaps the most weight. She is not a newcomer to the creative arts in any sense. She is one of Nigeria’s most important voices in theatre, a playwright, director, and activist celebrated for her landmark stage production HEAR WORD!, which brought stories of Nigerian women to audiences both at home and on international stages. Yet The Lost Days marks something entirely new: her first-ever on-screen acting performance. Directed by Wingonia Ikpi, the film tells the story of a family confronting buried truths as old tensions resurface. Fafunwa plays Chisom, and the performance is now available on Prime Video. The AMVCA jury’s decision to nominate her for Best Lead Actress on the strength of a debut screen performance, in a category that includes Bimbo Akintola, Linda Ejiofor, and Sola Sobowale, is a statement about the quality of what she delivered.
Ariyike Owolagba (Best Lead Actress, Something About The Briggs)
Something About The Briggs marks Ariyike Owolagba’s cinema debut, and she arrives at the AMVCA without any prior nominations to her name. She plays Sophie Briggs, a successful lawyer who turns down a marriage proposal because she believes a curse has destroyed every relationship in her family before hers. Her partner refuses to accept the rejection and begins unravelling the family’s buried history, forcing Sophie to face what she has spent years running from. The film was directed by Bukola Ogunsola. Owolagba’s first AMVCA nomination places her in the Best Lead Actress category for a performance that industry observers noted for its emotional precision and assured screen presence in a story rooted in love, legacy, and the weight of family secrets.
Olamide Kidbaby (Best Supporting Actress, Oversabi Aunty)
Olamide Kidbaby, widely known as a content creator, stepped fully into the acting arena with Oversabi Aunty, and the result is her first-ever AMVCA nomination. Her recognition in the Best Supporting Actress category makes her one of a growing number of digital creatives whose transition to scripted film has been validated by the industry’s leading awards body. The nomination sits her alongside Bisola Aiyeola, Funke Akindele, Linda Ejiofor, and Sola Sobowale in what is one of the stronger supporting actress fields the AMVCA has assembled in recent memory.
Simileoluwa Hassan (Best Supporting Actor, The Yard)
Simileoluwa Hassan arrives at the AMVCA stage for the first time on the strength of his work in The Yard, the M-Net original series that also picked up nominations for Best Scripted Series and Best Scripted M-Net Original at the 12th edition. The series tracks a character whose moral compass shifts so gradually that audiences find themselves questioning what they were rooting for from the start, and Hassan sits right at the centre of that tension. His performance brings a grounded, measured presence to a story that depends on its supporting architecture to make the lead’s unravelling feel believable. The nomination is his first, and it arrives as part of a showing that reflects well on the production as a whole.
Mike Ezuruonye (Best Lead Actor, Oversabi Aunty)
Mike Ezuruonye has been a recognisable face in Nollywood for years, but the AMVCA is only now coming around to acknowledge him. His Best Lead Actor nomination for Oversabi Aunty is his first at the awards. In the film, he plays Chidi, the Igbo husband of Toyin Abraham’s loud, morality-policing church usher character, functioning as the quieter counterweight to her very visible chaos. His comic timing, particularly in moments where he navigates Yoruba dialogue with an Igbo accent, carries levity without undermining the character’s credibility. It is the kind of grounded performance that risks going unnoticed in a film as busy as Oversabi Aunty, but Ezuruonye holds the family dynamic together with enough restraint and warmth that his presence registers even when the camera is not on him. Toyin Abraham herself spoke glowingly about the experience of working with him, saying he delivered beyond what she had imagined for the role.
Kanayo O. Kanayo (Best Lead Actor, Grandpa Must Obey)
Of all the first-time acting nominees at AMVCA 2026, Kanayo O. Kanayo may be the most unexpected, not because of any question about his talent, but because of how long it took the awards to get here. The veteran actor, whose screen presence has spent decades being synonymous with menace and intensity, steps into entirely different territory in Grandpa Must Obey. He plays a 70-year-old widower trapped in grief and resentment, whose stubbornness begins to crack after he is forced to babysit his two lively grandchildren. The film is a story about healing, forgiveness, and the joy that can return to a life that had seemingly closed itself off to it. His nomination for Best Lead Actor is his first at the AMVCA, and it comes for a role that asks him to be warm, funny, and emotionally open in ways that are genuinely new territory for him on screen.
Nadia Dutch (Best Supporting Actress, Aljana)
Nadia Dutch makes her AMVCA debut in the Best Supporting Actress category for her role in Aljana, one of the most distinctly regional productions represented in the 12th edition. The film also features in the Best Indigenous Language Film (West Africa) category and earned a Best Art Direction nomination, reflecting its visual and cultural ambition. Dutch’s inclusion in the supporting actress category places her among the most competitive field assembled for that category at this edition, which includes Funke Akindele, Linda Ejiofor, Sola Sobowale, and Bisola Aiyeola. Her first nomination comes in exactly the kind of company that confirms it was earned.
Amal Umar (Best Supporting Actress, The Herd)
Amal Umar’s first AMVCA nomination comes as part of one of the most decorated productions in the 12th edition. The Herd, directed by Daniel Etim Effiong, leads the 2026 nominations with nine total nods, including Best Overall Movie, Best Director, and multiple acting and technical recognitions. Umar’s work in the film earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination, placing her alongside Funke Akindele, Linda Ejiofor, Sola Sobowale, and Bisola Aiyeola in a category defined by established industry names. The strength of The Herd as a whole production gives her debut nomination additional weight, arriving within a film that the industry has broadly recognised as one of the best of the year.
Juliebrenda Nyambura (Best Supporting Actress, MTV Shuga Mashariki)
Juliebrenda Nyambura’s Best Supporting Actress nomination is significant beyond the individual achievement. The Kenyan actress earns her first AMVCA nod for her role in MTV Shuga Mashariki, the young adult drama series that returned to Kenya in 2025 after a 15-year hiatus and has since earned three nominations at the 12th edition, including Best Writing in a TV Series and Best Score. Her recognition in a competitive supporting actress category that includes Funke Akindele, Linda Ejiofor, and Sola Sobowale signals exactly the kind of continental expansion the AMVCA has been building toward under the leadership of head judge Joke Silva. For Kenyan audiences in particular, her nomination carries a broader meaning about what the continent’s most prestigious film awards are finally becoming.
Together, these eleven nominees represent something the AMVCA 2026 season quietly but confidently signals: that the path to African cinema’s biggest stage is widening. Whether they walk away with awards on May 9 is one conversation. That they arrived on the nomination list in the first place is already its own kind of statement and it’s worth celebrating.