BALTIMORE — As early as their first year of high school at Notre Dame Preparatory School, Celeste O’Connor would catch a bus from Towson to New York to audition for acting roles in independent films.

O’Connor, who was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and moved to Baltimore County around the age of 3, recalled having to ask teachers’ permission to leave school early.

“I would kind of have to finesse it a little,” said O’Connor, 25, who uses they/them pronouns. “I would bring a change of clothes, and change out of my uniform into my New York City clothes. And then my mom would drop me off at the bus.”

“I felt really cool,” they added. “Honestly, I felt really bad ass.”

More than a decade and a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University later, O’Connor is an established Hollywood actor known for roles in the 2019 Amazon Original “Selah and the Spades” and last year’s “A Good Person,” appearing alongside Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman. Their most recent work can be seen in “Madame Web,” Sony’s latest Spider-Man-adjacent flick also starring Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney and Isabela Merced that premiered in theaters last month.

This month, O’Connor, now based in New York, will appear on movie screens again in “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” opening this week in theaters.

“I look at myself as a catalyst or a conduit for stories that I think are important to me and my community,” O’Connor said of being a gender-nonconforming actor in the industry today and their goal to one day produce films that center more diversity.

On a video call in late February, O’Connor spoke also about being drawn to sci-fi gigs that offer an avenue for “imagining different types of worlds” — and reflect, in some sense, the academic work they did as a student at Johns Hopkins.

It was in their first summer taking an organic chemistry class that O’Connor, who studied public health and pre-medicine and graduated in 2021, auditioned for and booked the part of Paloma Davis in “Selah and the Spades,” a drama about the clandestine social underpinnings of student life at an East Coast boarding school.

“My education was always really important to me,” O’Connor said.

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