It's not everyday you hear Yoruba spoken on mainstream television—you can thank Sam Adegoke for that.

The Nigerian-American actor plays Jeff Colby, who originally was played by a white man, on The CW's Dynasty—a show based on Aaron Spelling's 1980s classic soap opera that eventually rose to be America's number one show. The re-up of Dynasty shows heiress Fallon Carrington (Elizabeth Gillies) not happy to discover her billionaire father Blake (Grant Show) engaged to Cristal (Nathalie Kelley), a rival employee at the family company. When Fallon's scheme to break them up backfired, costing her a promotion, she links up with her father's nemesis and former employee Jeff (Adegoke) and strikes out on her own. And that's only a nugget of the drama that's been brewing since the show aired last fall.

Having the reboot be set in Atlanta instead of Colorado sparked an idea that Adegoke eventually pitched to the network. Acknowledging the sizable population of Nigerians in the city, he insisted his character and the Colby family hail from the most populous country on the continent. "Jeff, my character, is like this self-made tech billionaire. He's like a Mark Zuckerberg," he told them. "Could he be Nigerian? 'Cause that's realistic." Dynasty's showrunner Sally Patrick took a liking to his pitch.