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.

“I really value public health and what it means to be well in this society, especially under capitalism, especially under a lot of these different oppressive systems. … It was just always important to me to, one, put myself in environments that would challenge me intellectually, and two, to follow through and just maintain that level of discipline where I could finish something that was a big challenge.”

While a student, O’Connor served as a doctor’s assistant in Lima, Peru, despite not speaking Spanish. In Baltimore, they participated in a program that connected people without reliable internet access to health services.

It was O’Connor’s “vibrant, energetic spirit” — plus their passion for social justice — that made an impression on former Hopkins assistant professor Cui Yang, who hired them as a research assistant in the spring of 2019 to help raise awareness around PrEP, a medication taken to lessen the chances of acquiring HIV.

O’Connor is “going to be excellent, no matter what [they] want to pursue in [their] career,” said Yang, now an associate professor at Rutgers School of Public Health. “I always encourage my students … to keep curious and explore different paths, pursue a passion.”

At Hopkins, O’Connor said they also developed an appreciation that “entertainment is an industry, and there are systems that I have to navigate.” That outlook on working as an actor has prompted them to “take things less personally.”

It’s a point of view that may have proven helpful as O’Connor’s most recent release, “Madame Web,” became mired in online criticism.

O’Connor played the role of Mattie Franklin, part of a trio of emerging young Spider-Women in “Madame Web,” which tells the story of Johnson’s Cassandra Webb, a New York paramedic who develops an ability to see future events before they happen.

After auditioning for months, O’Connor said they got to have a hand in crafting their character — a skateboarding kid from a wealthy family — to feel “real and well-rounded and honest, especially as the only Black girl in the cast and the only Black girl to ever play a Spider-Woman live action.”

O’Connor said they’ve become close friends with Sweeney and Merced, after bonding during overnight shoots and off set.

And unlike Johnson, who told Magic FM in mid-February that she hadn’t yet seen “Madame Web,” O’Connor said they’d already watched the movie three times.

In the first moments of her opening monologue for “Saturday Night Live” on March 2, Sweeney seemingly acknowledged a poor start at the box office and critical reviews of the film, saying: “You might have seen me in ‘Anyone but You’ or ‘Euphoria.’ You definitely did not see me in ‘Madame Web.’” The movie was also joked about at the Oscars.

It started when the trailer for the film spurred memes. Now, the web of media attention sparked by negative reviews — The New York Times used adjectives like“absurd” and “uninspired,” and Vulture called it“bad in a boring way”— feels as if it’s still spinning.

And yet some see in “Madame Web” future cult-classic potential.

“I think the movie will definitely age really well,” O’Connor said. “The thing that means the most to me is the fact that us three as young women, all from different backgrounds, get to be superheroes. And I hope that that just opens doors for other young women and other people of color to play whatever roles they want to play.”

A report released by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative last month analyzed 1,700 movies from 2007 to 2023. It found that across last year’s 100 top-grossing theatrically-released films in North America, only 30 featured girls or women as leads or co-leads — the smallest number since 2014. In 2023, “The Flash”’s Ezra Miller was the only nonbinary actor with a leading role, according to the report, which also identified 37 films featuring leads or co-leads from “underrepresented” racial and ethnic groups, an increase over the previous year, but only for men of color.

In “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” O’Connor will join Mckenna Grace, Bill Murray, Finn Wolfhard, Paul Rudd and others as Lucky Domingo, a character they also portrayed in “Ghostbusters: Afterlife.” That film performed well at the box office and received some enthusiastic reviews.

This time around, Lucky is older and living in New York. “She’s also more confident in her ghostbusting skills as well,” O’Connor said.

For O’Connor, who co-founded a production company called Pedestal in 2020, growing their talent includes aspiring to make queer and Black films as a producer.

“I want to continue to make science fiction movies that can serve as a blueprint or an example of what an alternate reality would look like, where women are in power, where Black people are in power, where queer people are in power,” they said.

“And so not just replicating the same systems that exist in our day-to-day life in films, but using film as a place to play with our imagination, for the purpose of expanding the collective’s imagination and moving towards a more free future.”

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