[1] Born in Accra, Ghana, M'Carthy moved to Canada at the age of 14, living first in Merritt, British Columbia and later in Scarborough, Ontario.
[1] He studied theatre at York University,[1] writing his first play The Kente Cloth and staging it at Toronto's SummerWorks festival during this time.
[4] In 2014, his plays Blue Bird, cowritten with Brad Cook, and Black Boys with Saga Collectif premiered as workshop productions.
[5] He has also acted in other plays, including productions of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band, Kwame Stephens' Man 2 Man, Lanford Wilson's Balm in Gilead, D. D. Kugler and William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth, and in Maxime Desmons' short film Au plus proche.
[9] In June 2020, M'carthy performed an excerpt from Obaaberima as part of the Buddies in Bad Times Queer Pride Inside special for CBC Gem.