Kwabena Peprah on The Tower, Netflix and Building His Own Career Path

Words: Luke Brown

Photography: Jack Lai

MUA & Hair: Anisha Williams

Kwabena Peprah had a remarkable 2025 and 2026 is already lining up to be just as demanding.

When he comes into focus on our Zoom call, all bright eyes and easy composure, the first word is “grateful.” Not just for this year, he stresses, but for the whirlwind of the last few.

At only 21, he has already stacked credits with Netflix and ITV, moving from project to project with certainty. He’s on a roll, and there is absolutely no sign of him slowing down - nor, frankly, any reason he should.

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Discovering Acting Outside the Traditional Blueprint

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Peprah hasn’t followed the standard-issue blueprint that so many young actors follow. He didn’t grow up in a creative household, nor was he funnelled through the usual theatrical pipelines. Instead, as he puts it, “acting felt like discovering a world I didn’t know existed.”

The spark was simple enough: hours spent absorbed in television and film, studying performances. From there, the interest grew insistently, and by the time GCSE choices rolled around, drama sat firmly at the centre - the first formal step in a path that suddenly made sense.

The foundations were laid organically, but Peprah’s next step was far more traditional: three years at the famed BRIT School, whose alumni list reads like a modern cultural census - including several former cover stars of The Guide. It was here that his instincts sharpened and his craft took shape.

“BRIT taught me everything - discipline, focus, teamwork, and what it really means to be an actor,” he reflects. The scope of the training, he insists, was transformative: “We touched on screenwriting, theatre-making, production, as well as film and TV. We learned Meisner, Stanislavski - BRIT shows you the whole picture of what the industry looks like once you leave.”

Skipping Drama School and Taking the Risk

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And that perspective mattered. Because once he graduated, Peprah swerved the conventional route once again. No drama school, no three-year conservatoire. Instead, he chose the riskier lane - stepping straight into the industry on his own terms. A gamble, certainly, but one with the potential for serious reward.

Rewarded he was. As he was wrapping up his final performance year at BRIT, his agent - Alex Sedgley, who had signed him during his showcase - called with the dream news for every young actor. He’d landed a major role in the acclaimed ITV drama The Tower (Season 3), a part he’d auditioned for months earlier.

“I remember the call so clearly,” he says. “Alex told me, ‘You booked it.’ Honestly, it was the best feeling.”

“They didn’t go down the traditional drama school route - they did BRIT, made their own content, and built a career...”

Three weeks later, he was on set. A leap of faith that had paid off in real time.

Peprah is quick to point out that he didn’t leap blindly. He’d been watching the blueprint being rewritten in real time by actors like Javon Wade and Percelle Ascott. “They didn’t go down the traditional drama school route - they did BRIT, made their own content, and built a career,” he says.

Their trajectory mattered. It proved there was another way through the industry’s maze. “They paved the way for people like me,” he adds - an acknowledgement of lineage, and of possibility.

Like fellow rising actor, Dom Bryant, Peprah belongs to a generation reshaping creative industries on its own terms - less concerned with rigid pathways, more focused on instinct, collaboration and individuality.

Landing The Tower and Finding His Breakthrough

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As he talks through the process of landing The Tower, it becomes clear just how winding the route to a “yes” can be. “I taped for the lead role first, then heard nothing for weeks. I was in New York with BRIT at the time,” he recalls.

Out of the blue, his agent called to say the team liked him - just not for the part he’d auditioned for. They wanted him for a different role.

“I flew home, went straight in for an in-person recall, met the director and producers,” he says. And then came the limbo: a week of total radio silence, the kind every actor knows too well.

“The response was amazing - a lot of people didn’t even recognise me, and how different my character was compared to my actual personality...”

Until, finally, that late-night call - the confirmation that set everything in motion.

Perhaps the most unnerving milestone - and the one that should, in theory, feel the most triumphant - is seeing yourself on screen. Peprah is no exception. “I’m my harshest critic, so it’s hard watching myself,” he admits. But the reaction to The Tower quickly drowned out any self-consciousness.

“The response was amazing - a lot of people didn’t even recognise me, and how different my character was compared to my actual personality. I guess that’s the most important thing an actor can do!” he says, laughing.

A telling victory: disappearing into the role so fully that even friends had to look twice.

Working With George Clooney on Netflix’s Jay Kelly

Kwabena wears: Oliver Spencer - Shirt, £149, oliverspencer.co.uk

Preparing for a character - and delivering a performance with weight - looks different for every actor. For Peprah, the compass points firmly toward naturalism. His style, he says, is “conversational, grounded, almost documentary-like.”

It’s an approach shaped as much by place as by training. “Growing up in London, you see and experience a lot, so I pull from real life. Everything I do has to come from a truthful place so the audience can feel it.”

That sense of observation and lived experience increasingly defines a wider generation of British creatives - from actors like Peprah to designers such as Jana Spence, whose work similarly draws from personal perspective, atmosphere and identity.

A philosophy anchored in honesty - and one that shapes his presence on screen.

It’s also something he witnessed at close range earlier this year while working with director Noah Baumbach on the Netflix film Jay Kelly, starring George Clooney and Adam Sandler.

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Yes, Peprah has spent some of his year acting opposite Clooney - a sentence he still delivers with a mix of disbelief and pride.

“Noah is so precise - such a naturalistic director - and watching him work with Clooney felt like a masterclass,” he recalls, reflecting on how Baumbach’s approach mirrors his own instincts.

“I filmed my scene in April. Being on a production of that scale was insane. I played an American high school kid interacting with Clooney for an autograph. It was phenomenal to see him at work…”

Theatre, Rejection and the Mindset Behind the Momentum

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Even while rubbing shoulders with Hollywood royalty, Peprah has carved out time for theatre - a medium he speaks about with unmistakable affection.

Earlier this year, he starred in The 392 at Brixton House, directed by Toby Clarke, in the first-ever stage adaptation of the beloved novel. “It reignited my love for theatre,” he says. “It was the first time the book had ever been adapted for the stage. We had a sold-out run, the audience loved it.”

He played Boxer - “a young guy trying to figure himself out, in love with his brother’s baby mother,” he adds. Chaotic, conflicted, deeply human - and, by Peprah’s account, brilliant fun. “I’d love to do it again.”

“I see it as redirection. It’s never personal - you just didn’t fit the world they were building...”

Yet despite what looks, from the outside, like a stellar run, Peprah is quick to acknowledge the setbacks and near-misses that sit beneath it.

Rejection is part of the ecosystem, he says, and resilience is the only real currency in an industry famously hard to break into.

He speaks about it with a level of calm, almost philosophical clarity. “I see it as redirection. It’s never personal - you just didn’t fit the world they were building. I distract myself with walks, cinema, friends. Reset, and move on. There’s always another ‘yes’ coming.”

Looking Ahead for Peprah

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It’s perhaps this mindset - as much as the talent or the graft - that sets Peprah apart.

The ability to take disappointment, reroute it, and turn it into momentum is something most actors only learn after years of turbulence.

He seems to have found it early. And with 2026 already stacking up with new projects, and directors returning to work with him, there’s a calm steadiness beneath the ascent.

Peprah isn’t following the rules; he’s writing his own playbook.

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