The Wild Reed: Albert Mwangi

Showing posts with label Albert Mwangi. Show all posts

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.

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Albert Mwangi as Hamlet

Today is Shakespeare Day, sometimes referred to as Talk Like Shakespeare Day. It’s celebrated every year on April 23 to commemorate both the birth and death of William Shakespeare, considered by many as the greatest playwright in the English language.

To mark Shakespeare Day at The Wild Reed, I share this evening something very special: Stage and screen actor Albert Mwangi as Prince Hamlet, reciting the Danish prince’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy (and then some) from Hamlet, one of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays.

Notes Wikipedia:

[Hamlet’s] speech is named for the opening phrase, itself among the most widely known and quoted lines in modern English literature, and has been referenced in many works of theatre, literature and music. In the speech, Hamlet contemplates death and suicide, weighing the pain and unfairness of life against the alternative, which might be worse. It is not clear that Hamlet is thinking of his own situation since the speech is entirely in an abstract, somewhat academic register that accords with Hamlet’s status as a (recent) student at Wittenberg University. Furthermore, Hamlet is not alone as he speaks because Ophelia is on stage waiting for him to see her, and Claudius and Polonius have concealed themselves to hear him. Even so, Hamlet seems to consider himself alone and there is no definite indication that the others hear him before he addresses Ophelia, so the speech is almost universally regarded as a sincere soliloquy.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die – to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause – there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

Images: Albert Mwangi as Hamlet at the Parade Theatre, National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Sydney, Australia – August 2020.

Saturday, June 18, 2022

Tian Richards’ Message to Queer Youth: “Every Part of Your Identity Is a Superpower”

The Wild Reed’s 2022 Queer Appreciation series continues with a celebration of actor Tian Richards and the show in which he stars, Tom Swift. What’s there to celebrate, you may be asking. Well, Tian, in taking on the title role in The CW’s latest new series, is making history as the first gay, Black lead on network television.

Based on the main character of over 100 young adult science fiction and adventure novels dating back to 1910, Tom Swift is also a spin-off of The CW’s Nancy Drew series. As such, it's set in the “Drew-niverse.” It premiered on May 31, 2022.

Speaking with TV Line last year during the filming of the new adaptation, Tian Richards shared the following.

The original Tom Swift was great for his time and what he represented. At the time, that was the face of young boys, All-American kids full of possibilities.

But [today], that can look so different. It can look like someone like me – a Black guy who is chocolate, who is queer, who is all those things that we’re told aren’t the normal or the status quo. We’re going to dive into so many sectors of identity. We’re going to talk about Blackness – and a different kind of Blackness than we’re used to seeing, which is the Black elite, the 1 percent, the billionaires. Were also going to talk about a queer boy’s journey into becoming a queer man. Not only self-acceptance, but acceptance as a whole, having the community and people around you.

If I had an opportunity to see someone like this exist when I was younger, just think of how much sooner I would have felt [more confident] in my skin and welcomed by the world. I had representation here and there, but it was usually a secondary character, or you felt like they were being stereotyped. Tom gets to exist in all of his beauty and pride. He gets to grow up in a family with a legacy, to have endless possibilities in education and tech and inventing. He gets to realize himself for himself, and that’s beautiful for anyone to see.

Above: Tian Richards and Hayward Leach in Tom Swift (2022).

More recently, Tian spoke with JustJaredJr.com and shared the following.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine someone who looks like me and shows up in the world as I do, could be the hero! I am immensely proud to be the first Black gay lead on network TV.

I am thankful for the shoulders I stand on that have allowed me to get to this place, and for you be next generations to come that will be inspired by what we have created. For those young queer kids, those young Black kids who didn’t think they could lead, it’s POSSIBLE. And every part of your identity is a superpower! Keep dreaming, keep pushing, your time is coming! Happy Pride Month!

Following are some more quotes from Tian Richards. Enjoy!

What I love about the show is that we get to show-up in a very human, very celebatory way. It’s not about being tolerated, but being celebrated. It’s not about being preachy or beating anyone over the head with a message, but showing up, telling human stories, being ourselves, having fun. And I just love that aspect of being carefree, being Black, being queer, without carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.

– Source

There [was a] level of pride and it was feeling that beauty and that triumph going into it. And not only that, but to see us as in the sci-fi world, to see us intelligent, to know little queer boys will watch this – or girls or whoever – and feel inspired, seeing somebody that looks like them. Because that was always a void for me growing up, not seeing anybody I typically related to.

– Source

When I first got the role and was preparing everything, I was like “Well maybe I should read the source material to see what it’s about,” knowing that he came out in the early 1910s and twenties and what-not. But then once I got through some of it, I’m like, “Oh, this language is not only really dated, it’s really offensive.” And I understand it was written for and of the times, but the biggest takeaway that I got from it was their version, the first version, of Tom Swift—this young, all-American, blonde hair, blue-eyed kid—that was the idea of having endless possibility in this country.

Today, that looks so different. It can be somebody that’s black, that’s LGBT, and queer, and all the beautiful intersections that I represent and that Tom represents. And you know what, we can also be very empowered in that. And it’s not a victimization and it’s not feeling ashamed of it, but it’s having full pride and it’s having full capability. And I think that’s the beautiful thing.

– Source

Tom’s into aerospace engineering and AI [voiced by LeVar Burton], all these cool things. So you will see a lot of his inventions, what readers fell in love with in the first series of books. Things like the taser and the electric rifle and all the things that we got to see before, but in a 2021 version. Where technology is now and how much we’ve progressed, we’re able to see that.

In preparing, I was looking at a lot of things with this amazing, amazing young, black inventor, Iddris Sandu. He’s most known for being one of the youngest people to work at Google, and at Uber, he helped develop their algorithms. So in the same way that Robert Downey Jr. used Elon Musk to prepare for Tony Stark, Iddris Sandu was that for me in this. I just so admire it. And then a little bit of Jaden Smith. Those are the people I feel like are young, in tech, and are definitely aware of their privilege, but they get the job done, you know?

– Source

Not only is it great to be a part of this and to play this character, but this is something young Tian would have wanted and needed to see for so many reasons. And it just goes to show the evolution that we’re moving towards and the work that was done before. We had shows like Noah’s Arc and Looking back before us to really embody that world. But to show that we can be more than just our identities? That our identities are just a part of who we are and they don’t make the entire story? That we’re people just like everybody else? That’s the beautiful part.

– Source

And about the sex scene between Tom and Justin (Hayward Leach) in Episode 3, executive producer Cameron Johnson had this to say to TVLine:

I think in Episode 3 we probably have one of the most groundbreaking, sexiest gay scenes I’ve ever seen on network TV. . . . I looked at the cut and I thought, “There’s no way the network is going to let us get away with this.” And they said, “Of course you can!” So, kudos to The CW.