As his acting career enters a new chapter, Da’Vinchi reflects on the books that changed his imagination, the upbringing that taught him resourcefulness, and why mental-health advocacy has become part of his work.

After nearly a decade in the entertainment industry, Da’Vinchi has accumulated the kind of credits that make the phrase “rising star” feel increasingly insufficient. Now, with Netflix’s Why Did I Get Married Again? and NBC’s Chicago Fire, he is arriving at a point in his career where the years of work are beginning to look less like a series of fortunate breaks and more like a foundation.

“I feel that I'm at a different level,” he says. “Now it's like, this is my career.”

“In the beginning, it's almost like, okay, you're kind of getting lucky,” he explains. “I thought I may have been a one-hit wonder. But then, if you're consistently booking projects and you're objectively looking at the numbers, the viewership and stuff like that, then it turns into, ‘Oh, shoot. This is kind of my career.’”

There is a moment in his voice where the realization still seems to surprise him. “It's not just like I'm not just getting lucky,” he says. “And it's God's grace and favor in my life right now.”

That sense of disbelief follows him into some of the more surreal moments of his career. When Tyler Perry reached out to him about Why Did I Get Married Again?, Da’Vinchi initially ignored the call because he didn't recognize the number.

“He texted me like, ‘Oh man, it's Tyler,’” Da’Vinchi remembers. “I was like, ‘What?’”

“I was like, ‘Yo, what the heck?’”

He called back. Perry had sent him the script and wanted Da’Vinchi to choose which character he wanted to play.

“For me, that's like, ‘Oh my goodness,’” he says. “Now I know what it's like to be Matt Damon or Will Smith—to get a producer calling you and asking, ‘Hey, take a look at this script. Let me know which character you want to play.’”

Then came another detail: filming would begin in two weeks.

“Should I believe this?” Da’Vinchi laughs. “It's crazy.”

But if the circumstances surrounding his career are increasingly extraordinary, Da’Vinchi doesn't seem particularly interested in separating the actor from the person who had to imagine becoming one in the first place.

In fact, when asked what his recent projects have taught him about himself, his answer isn't about fame or recognition.

“It taught me I was crazy enough to actually believe in myself to go pursue this dream and actually make it,” he says. Then he qualifies the word. “But in a good way, you kind of have to be a little crazy sometimes to make it.”

He remembers being viewed that way when he was starting out.

“At first, everybody looked at me like I was crazy, I was delusional,” he says. “But I think it was Mike Tyson that said, ‘Delusion is only a delusion until you make that delusion become a reality, and you're not delusional no more.’”

Da’Vinchi traces a significant part of his worldview back to his teenage years, when his older brother introduced him to Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. He was around 16 or 17 and immediately found himself fascinated by its ideas.

“He started talking about some wild concepts and ideas, and I was like, ‘What?’” Da’Vinchi says. “‘No, that makes sense.’” He remembers having what he describes as a kind of “childlike faith.”

“I just thought, ‘Wait, what? This is crazy. I can really think something into existence?’”

The idea that thoughts could precede tangible things fascinated him. He and his brothers began studying people, ideas and the relationship between imagination and creation. Eventually, he began to recognize something familiar in those ideas through his faith.

“This is before I actually started diving into the Bible,” he explains. “But I didn't realize that it was just speaking exactly within the Bible already.”

“God was speaking, and He said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light,” he says. “So that's the first time we ever saw the manifestation of words becoming tangible.” At that point, reading became something much larger than self-help. “It was the self-help book that made me like, ‘Whoa, this is crazy,’” he says. “And then from there, I just started reading a bunch of other books.”

But what did reading actually give him?

The answer comes quickly.

“It gave me hope. It gave me imagination. You get to make up the story and take it as loud as you want,” he continues. “It's crazy. Reading allowed me to access a world beyond the tangible, beyond what anybody has ever created.” He began thinking about what reading could actually provide; and what information might remain inaccessible to people who never seek it out.

“Successful people leave a blueprint behind,” he says. “Usually it's in a book.” Eventually, books began helping him understand not just the world he wanted to enter, but the world he had come from.

“When I started reading books that kind of applied to my life, when I started learning about history in chronological order, or how it affects me, and not the way the school system teaches it, then it put a battery on my back,” he says.

To understand why books could hold so much power for Da’Vinchi, it helps to understand the environment in which he discovered them.

He grew up in New York and New Jersey before moving to Florida. He describes his childhood as poor by American standards, while also emphasizing that poverty is relative. “My mom was making $30-something thousand dollars a year, taking care of five of us in the household,” he says. “It was five of us in one room.”

But Da’Vinchi doesn't describe his upbringing solely through what was missing. Instead, he repeatedly returns to what scarcity gave him.

“We had this poverty that really was my biggest weapon,” he says. He connects that idea to the Biblical concept of being “poor in spirit,” describing poverty as an experience that can make a person more aware of what they don't possess; and therefore more attentive to the people and knowledge that can help them. “If you lived your life realizing that I have no money on my own, everything that I have is a loan, it changes how you view things,” he says.

“My upbringing was conducive to my brain being able to dive into books and learn about other people's lives because I didn't have as many distractions,” he says. That directness also taught him to separate necessity from desire. “I understood a need and a want is two different things,” he says. “I don't need a bunch of cars. I don't need internet. I don't need ten meals a day. This is something I want.”

For Da’Vinchi, that distinction became a kind of freedom. “Once you've stripped life to what is real necessities, it changed the game for me.” That same desire to understand what is beneath the surface eventually brought Da’Vinchi to mental-health advocacy. “We don't have the skills and the competency at a young age to start figuring things out,” he says. “You start figuring things out, you rely on God, you question things, you critically think in the right way.”

He believes young people are often encouraged to build their identities around feelings without necessarily learning how to understand those feelings.

Da’Vinchi has seen the consequences of untreated struggles within his own family. He speaks about brothers, cousins and other family members who have been incarcerated, died, or experienced devastating circumstances. “I've seen a lot of that in my life,” he says. For him, those experiences demonstrated how early decisions and environments can shape the trajectory of a person's life.

“At a certain age, all those terrible habits just kind of crystallize, and they really show themselves,” he says. And mental health, he argues, cannot be separated from those circumstances. “It all starts at such a young age,” he says. That realization produced something he describes not as a career strategy, but as responsibility.

“I had this moral obligation to go out and just speak to people and just help people,” he says. “I know the majority of people don't listen, but it just makes me feel a lot better that at least I'm actually just trying.” As a mental-health advocate and NAMI ambassador, Da’Vinchi is particularly interested in the barriers that prevent people from talking about what they are experiencing.

One of those barriers, he says, is vulnerability. “Vulnerability is a key to true strength,” he says. He believes people can be taught to see vulnerability as weakness, particularly in communities where emotional openness may be difficult to practice. But the unwillingness to speak can also create isolation. “One of the biggest things is making us think that our problems are unique, and no one else has them,” he says. “When you start talking about it, you realize everybody goes through it in some way, shape, or form.”

“When you don't have access to it and you're not being educated upon it, you don't feel like this is normal,” he says. “You're just holding everything in.”

Eventually, he says, something has to give.

“You're human. You're gonna explode.”

It would be easy to look at Da’Vinchi's current career and see only the visible parts: the shows, the films, the calls from major producers, the increasingly recognizable name. But his story makes more sense when viewed from the inside out. Even his approach to acting is connected to that same willingness to imagine something before it exists.

“I was crazy enough to actually believe in myself,” he says.