Is Kershaw Our Next Great Filmmaker?

He’s influential but isn’t your typical influencer. You might call him a model, despite the fact he didn’t step on a fashion week runway until a few weekends ago (Natasha Zinko’s Fall 2026 show). He feels like a gonzo filmmaker, but you’re watching his work on a platform that famously serves you slop. His name is Kershaw, and he’s a Union Jack-donning, peroxide-blond internet bad boy with a barbed-wire tattoo where his pubic hair should be.

You’ve seen him on your FYP by now, and you probably can’t describe what you’re watching, but you like it. So does everyone from the rapper Feng to the Oscar-nominated e-boy Kodi Smit-Mcphee, who both show up in his likes and comments. In overly simple terms: Sub-15-second silent cinematic vignettes that riff on the culture surrounding him, or veer off into surreal, fantastical territories. In one, Kershaw steps out of a betting shop expressing anguish at, you imagine, all the money he’s lost. Then he finds a bottle of beer in his back pocket and all is well again. In another, a girl—we assume a lover—catches him squeezing VR breasts, prompting him to storm out in shame. In another, he pulls a copy of The Son newspaper (a riff on the derided British tabloid rag The Sun) from someone’s hands on the London underground, sees himself on the cover, then throws it away in dismay as he marches down the platform. Another person with the same fake newspaper passes him. He has never spoken on camera. When he agrees to meet me at a pub in West London and talk over a pint, it feels like the first crack in the mystique.

“I act like a cunt on camera,” he says, when I ask him to describe what he does. “It’s the best job in the world.”

Despite none of his videos lasting long enough to be monetizable on TikTok, his sizable following, 195K on Instagram and 275K on TikTok, has led to link-ups with niche fashion brands, earning him enough cash and dot-com clout to hold off on going to university in Manchester. “I just want to impact millions of people, to be fair,” he says confidently, “and I’m grateful and lucky that that’s what I’m starting to do.”

Some basic facts: 

• He calls himself Kershaw, as does his team.
• It’s his mother’s surname, and his own now too. 
• His parents separated when he was 7. 
• He is 20. 
• Hometown? Mansfield. “Basically 40 minutes from Nottingham.”

This wasn’t an accident, but rather the natural byproduct of a boy who spent his teenage years religiously watching Jacksepticeye videos, paired with a keen, ongoing interest in more traditional films. He name-checks Blade Runner, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and All Quiet on the Western Front in conversation. When he first started making videos, “it was similar to the content that existed already,” he tells me. “It’s just a bit boring to be honest. There’s a lot of these creators, but there’s nothing really to them. Now, I think people love my stuff because there’s a narrative.”

Kershaw started developing this style only a year ago. It took, by his estimate, “just three or four videos” for him to go viral. “Everything is a reference,” he says. There’s a handful of early videos from this time last year that use audio of Danny Dyer in The Business, playing a cocksure British cocaine baron living in the Costa del Sol. Kershaw took it and set it to a video of him and his swagged-out mates owning the streets of his hometown. “That audio I found was a reference for the character in the video. Sometimes it’ll be an outfit, and that will influence the music and the style. Everything has to make sense in its own world.” 

This might surprise anyone who sees videos of a braggadocious little bastard causing havoc, centering himself—but the man you see is a character, not Kershaw. “The people that are best at playing idiots are the smartest,” he says. 

He arrives at a crest point in internet culture for young men. The ultimate gender cult has been brainwashing teenage boys, luring them towards a misogynistic, right-wing culture. Andrew Tate wrote a gospel followed by his braggadocious Kick-streaming disciples. America has Clavicular, even if he’s in crash-out mode. Great Britain has HSTikkyTokky, whose popularity has lasted so long that even he has spawned spawned copycats. CostaKid is next. But Kershaw isn’t interested in feeding the toxic masculinity machine.

On the surface, Kershaw—a straight white guy—fits too neatly into that framework. He has swagger. His videos, in which he’s surrounded by girls in skimpy outfits, drinking and flexing fits, make him feel like the kind of lad you might run into on a night out and envy for how easily he gets women’s attention. But Kershaw’s politics are surprisingly based if you look closely. In a recent video, he spray-painted over graffiti reading “Britain needs Reform”—a reference to the extreme right-wing party rising in popularity in Britain—and added “Reggae” in its place. His brandishing of the union jack—a triggering symbol for plenty of people who find nationalism unsavory—instead feels like an act of reclamation. “I’m painfully aware of Britain’s colonial history and what we have done to the world,” he says. “It’s why it really irritates me when people say migrants can’t come here, when we have destroyed so many countries. None of that wealth we acquired actually went to the people. It stayed at the top.”

A few weeks before we met, he posted a story that felt antithetical to the beats followed by his contemporaries. “I stand w the girls and the gays,” he wrote on an Instagram story. “If you are a homophobe you are less than me and your fake prophet has reserved your place in hell.” 

“I lost 7,000 followers from that, you know?” he tells me, not giving a single fuck. “I think it’s really important that young men have someone that isn’t just feeding them bullshit, because that is what most of that space is. I used to be really nasty to people.  It was because I was young and didn’t know how the world worked. Now there’s grown men with daughters and they’re thinking the way I was thinking when I was 14.” Then, he says, he “went outside,” in a metaphorical sense, schooled himself, and realized he was on the wrong side of history. If anything, that inspired him to feed that message to others.

“We don’t need to encourage young boys to be sleeping around having strange expectations of women,” he says. Even if, in his videos, he’s flanked by beautiful women, he has respect for them. Despite being a flirt back in the day, these days he’s loyal to his girlfriend. “I don’t [sleep around,]” he clarifies. He loves sex, but “I’d rather clart loads with the same woman.” 

Kershaw was spotted French kissing a girl on the front row of the Natasha Zinko show last weekend after bounding down the runway. He’s the prototypical “social anxiety is scared of him” star. “We did the rehearsal walk, and I was like, ‘This is a piece of piss,’” but it’s not always that way. “I only have bad anxiety when there’s big crowds.”. He struggles with the kind of influencer events most internet people lap up. He feels out of place, thrown off by so many moving parts. He is a director in that sense, most comfortable when he knows how to perfectly orchestrate his own situation from scratch. 

Despite his newfound fame, Kershaw is conscious of staying grounded. He hasn’t left home for London yet, and all of his mates are from around where he grew up or Manchester. He’s become conscious of his co-sign. “A little lad who used to live on my street came up to me and asked me: ‘Can you follow my new account? You’re my only claim to fame!’” Kershaw obliged. “If you’ve got my respect and you show me some love, that’s not gonna disappear,” he says. “I pride myself on those values.”