Rise to Fame
A casting call he stumbled into without an agent and without knowing what show it was put him on Skins as both a writer and actor. Jordan Peele saw his Black Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Merits" and cast him in Get Out on the strength of that performance alone. The film grossed $255 million worldwide and earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination at 28. That's a lot of runway to cover in under a decade.
In the Spotlight
Winning the Oscar was only the beginning of a strange few years. After sweeping all five major film awards for Judas and the Black Messiah in 2021, reports emerged that he'd fired his Hollywood management team and handed authority over career decisions to a woman calling herself "Heir Holiness," described as a personal life strategist. A tweet reviving the story in mid-2025 pulled 22.5 million views. He declined to engage with it publicly. The pivot is real: his directorial debut The Kitchen dropped on Netflix in 2024, and his production company 59% Productions has multiple A24 projects in the pipeline.
Side Notes
Both his parents emigrated from Uganda, and the family is enormous by any measure: his mother is one of 22 siblings, his father one of 49. He grew up on a council estate in Camden and wrote his first play at nine. His Oscar speech namechecked Kampala directly, which sparked a genuine national debate in Uganda about whether to claim him. He's unmistakably British, but that's the tension that probably makes him interesting to watch.