The Wild Reed: Albert Mwangi Is Living His Dream of “Telling Stories Authentically and Consistently”

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Albert Mwangi Is Living His Dream of “Telling Stories Authentically and Consistently”

I first became aware of Kenyan-born stage and screen actor Albert Mwangi when I recently watched (on DVD) the short-lived 2022 U.S. television series Tom Swift.

Above: Albert Mwangi as Rowan and Tian Richards as Tom in Tom Swift (2022).

To be honest, despite its decidely queer-friendly vibe and content, I wasn’t particularly taken in by Tom Swift. I did, however, find myself taking notice of Albert Mwangi. And not just because of his looks.

The man is a phenomenal actor, one who clearly knows how to find and convey multiple dimensions of a character. Indeed, I found Mwangi’s character of Rowan (right) to be the most intriguing and compelling in the show. Sure, a big part of this was no doubt due to the writing of the character, but Mwangi added to it by giving the mysterious Rowan a depth that only a great actor can accomplish.

There’s not much online about Albert Mwangi, which I think is by design – and it’s another reason I admire him. He is clearly more focused on cultivating his art than on maintaining a celebrity status. One thing I did find was the following interview by Andrew F. Peirce for his podcast The Curb. Here’s how Peirce introduces his January 19, 2025 interview with Mwangi, followed by the audio of the hour-long interview itself. Enjoy!

Let’s take a moment to look ahead in 2025 to a few of the Australian films that will get people talking. Two particular films had their world premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival in 2024, where their lead actor and performer, Albert Mwangi, was in attendance.

Kate Blackmore’s Make It Look Real [left] is a hybrid-documentary experience that explores the role of intimacy coordination on film sets. Albert features in the documentary as himself, and in the film-within-a-film as a character in Kieran Darcy-Smith’s romantic thriller Tightrope. Make It Look Real is a captivating and conversation-starting film about how intimacy has been presented on screen and how it can safely be depicted for all actors involved.

Albert’s other film that premiered the Adelaide Film Festival was Kelly Schilling’s With or Without You, where he plays Dalu, a migrant worker swept into the lives of Melina Vidler’s Chloe and her alcoholic mother, Sharon, played with effortless abandon by Marta Dusseldorp [pictured with Albert at right].

With both of these films, Albert holds the audiences focus keenly, asking us to lean in to find out more about his performances. This level of captivation is partly the reason why he was nominated for the Casting Guild of Australia’s Rising Star list of 2021.

In the following interview, Albert talks about the balance of working on stage and screen, how he manages his creative journey as a storyteller and a vessel for others stories, and where he would like to see his career progress from here.

– Andrew F. Peirce
The Curb
January 19, 2025

Following is the official trailer for Kelly Schilling’s With or Without You, starring Albert Mwangi, Melina Vidler, and Marta Dusseldorp.

As well as starring in the soon-to-be-released films With or Without You and Make It Look Real, Albert Mwangi also featured in the award-winning 2020 short film Hollow Hands, directed by Sean Hall. For an interview with the cast of this film, click here.

Mwangi also has a (seemingly supporting) role in the upcoming Primitive War. Set in Vietnam in 1968, director Luke Sparke’s adaptation of Ethan Pettus’s novel of the same name, Primitive War tells the tale of a recon unit known as Vulture Squad that is sent to an isolated jungle valley to uncover the fate of a missing Green Beret platoon.

Writing about the film for Collider, Rachael Blair Severino notes the following.

[Primitive War follows] an elite extraction team ordered to find and recover a platoon that’s gone MIA somewhere in the jungle. [The film] looks like it will be launching into tense action from the get-go. The crew investigates the shadowy jungle, searching for the missing men and what took them. Unfortunately for them, the answer is far toothier than anticipated.

A famously fraught time in American history, it will be interesting to see if the film toys with any psychological horror through existential questions of fairness. The Vietnam War was the first televised war, and it served as a real-life horror for a lot of Americans. The men of Primitive War were likely drafted, and now, not only are they trying to survive a war, but they’re also being hunted by dinosaurs. There are lots of opportunities for subtle horror indicators before ever getting to the dinosaurs, like addressing how young the majority of drafted personnel were, the terrifying implications of a missing platoon, or any of the other grim realities of war.

Above: Albert Mwangi in Primitive War (2025). Hopefully his character survives! To view the official trailer for this “dinosaur horror” movie, click here.

On a brighter note, in his interview with Andrew F. Peirce, Mwangi mentioned that he lived for a time in Brisbane, Australia.

Interestingly, a series of photos on Mwangi’s Facebook page reminds me of King Island, a small island one can walk out to from Brisbane’s Wellington Point at low tide.

It’s a very beautiful place, and one that I visited just a month ago during my most recent sojourn in my homeland. I can’t say for sure that the following photos were taken on King Island, but like I said, they remind me of it.