Athie began his career in theater—making his Broadway debut in 2015—and subsequently had supporting roles in films like Patti Cake$ (2017), The Circle (2017), Unicorn Store (2017), The Front Runner (2018), and Underwater (2020), and in the television series The Get Down (2016–2017), The Detour (2017), Sorry for Your Loss (2018–2019). He had first feature film starring roles in 2020, starring in Netflix's Uncorked and Amazon's Black Box.