Jayma Mays Biography

Birth Name : Jayma Suzette Mays

Date of Birth : 16 July 1979, Grundy, Virginia, USA

Height : 5' 4" (1.63 m)

Occupation : Actress, singer

Jayma was born Jamia Suzette Mays. She was raised in Grundy, Virginia, with her older brother and sister. Her father was a high school teacher at Grundy Senior High School for 7 years, before spending 25 years working in the coal-mining industry. He is now retired and lives with Jayma's mother in Bristol.

At school, Jayma enjoyed Math and singing. She graduated from high school in 1997. She then went on to get an Associate degree from Southwest Virginia Community College. She then did a year at Virginia Tech, transferring to Radford University. After earning her degree in Theatre in 2000, she moved to California.

Mays expanded her acting profile with recurring roles in a string of highly acclaimed TV series. She played a Hollywood agent's witty and sassy assistant on HBO's "Entourage" (2004- ) before landing a supernatural role on NBC's "Heroes" (NBC, 2006- ). Mays played Charlie, a diner waitress with telepathic powers and the love interest of time traveler Hiro Nakamura (Masi Oka). Although her character is eventually murdered by the series' primary villain, Sylar (Zachary Quinto), she reprised the role of Hiro's ill-fated girlfriend on a 2009 episode that found him zipping back in time to save his sweetheart. Mays and Oka also played lovers on "Get Smart's Bruce and Lloyd: Out of Control" (2008), a direct-to-DVD release inspired by the feature film "Get Smart" (2008). In 2007, Mays returned to comedy with a recurring role on ABC's fish-out-of-water series "Ugly Betty" (ABC, 2006- ), in which she portrayed Charlie, the scheming and back-stabbing girlfriend of Betty Suarez's (America Ferrara) workplace crush, Henry (Christopher Gorham). The doe-eyed actress was deliciously evil as her character befriended Betty as a ploy to block the budding romance between the bespectacled heroine and her own boyfriend. Charlie finally crushed Betty's hopes of falling in love by announcing she was pregnant with Henry's child. The love triangle injected the perfect dose of drama and tension to the show's well-received first season.