words DOUGLAS GREENWOOD
photography SKYE CASU
As a kid, sitting in front of a wall of VHS tapes full of Disney movies and old classics, Kieron Moore insisted on watching a cassette that bore his own name, written in pen on the spine. After hesitating, he says, his mom pressed play. A clip began to play of his own dad—Kieron Moore Sr.—fighting in a boxing ring. It inspired him to follow in father’s footsteps, becoming a renowned boxer around Manchester, where he grew up.
Only now, looking back on that fateful VHS tape, can Moore see what he might have been drawn to. “I loved the feeling of someone trying to hurt me and I could evade them,” he says. “I loved the win.” But perhaps, most interestingly, gazing at his dad’s life through a screen, he remembers feeling like he “loved the showmanship.” It would take three career changes for him to settle on the one that suits him best: acting.
It’s a Friday afternoon in October and Moore has survived a red eye flight back from New York, far from Droylsden, on the outskirts of Manchester, where he grew up. “I’m very lucky,” Moore says, his accent still unmistakably Manchunian. “I get to bounce about and tell my little stories.” Earlier this month, his latest project Boots debuted on Netflix—a based-on-real-life comedy drama about a gay kid in ‘90s America following his best friend into the Marines. The cast congregated in New York for the show’s premiere, a big reunion after the show wrapped shooting last summer. Making the show—alongside Miles Heizer, Liam Oh, and his Manchunian brother Max Parker—felt like being “part of a boyband” he says. Since the show dropped, the internet’s developed an intense thirst for Moore and his castmates. As one Instagram comment puts it: “I fear he’s the hottest man I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”
In it, Moore plays Slovacek, a tough, intimidating soldier who’s joined the military to escape his dark, criminal past. He had to preface his actions before the camera started rolling. “Look, I’m not a dick,” he’d say, “and I don’t mean any of the things that I’m gonna say in character.” The show shot for a week before the SAG-AFTRA strike hit, then the group came together again. “I think over time, you just naturally get so close and soft anyway. I’m a big believer in having a little bit of everything inside me.”
Still, casting directors know how to play with Moore’s in-built sense of machismo. He’s had an interesting post-pandemic career—leading a series of Vampire Academy, being one of the many boys that appeared in the Spielberg war epic Masters of the Air, on which he rubbed shoulders with Barry Keoghan and Austin Butler—but the most interesting thing he’s said ’yes’ to is an queer independent feature that first met audiences earlier this summer. It’s called Blue Film, and in it Moore plays a caricature of masculinity: a dominating cam boy, whose job revolves around belittling men for the purpose of their pleasure. One night, he heeds the call of a die-hard fan, who wants to spend the night with him with the price tag of $50,000. Only when he gets there, and the proverbial cloak comes off, does he realize who he’s in the company of. What unfolds is a sinister, fascinating look at exorcising our pasts. When we reviewed the film, we called it “repulsive and provocative”. Moore is astounding in it: perfectly tempered and unpredictable. You can’t take your eyes off of him.
The script asks a lot of him: He’s exposed, emotionally and physically, and there are some scenes so discomforting that they’re tricky to watch. When he got the script he was disquieted, “I didn’t know if I could do it,” Moore says, “but I also didn’t want anyone else doing it.” But being part of something like that was what drew Moore to it in the first place. He’s seen it twice with an audience now, once at its Edinburgh Film Festival world premiere, then again at NewFest in New York. “The interesting thing is that you can hear a pin drop,” he says. “No one eats popcorn when they watch it. No one sips their drink. I mean it.”
Before he shot Blue Film, he spoke to his acting coach. He asked Moore, “Do you want to be a famous actor, or do you want to be a dangerous artist?” Moore’s response: “I want to be a dangerous artist. That’s what all my favorite actors are. [Fame] is not something that I’m interested in.”
Growing up Moore was “shy and gentle and soft”. When he set off to become a boxer aged 10, he was achieving the dream his father—who had only fought maybe three or four times—had wanted but never had the chance to pursue. It stuck with him all the way through high school (where he was head boy) even when the desire to act started to shine through. He vividly recalls a memory of his school putting on a performance of Grease for his year’s leaving ceremony. He wanted to audition: “I got the hair, I got the leather jacket. I wanted to be Kenickie,” he says. He remembers showing up to the auditorium, ready to prove himself. “All of the football team walked past. I thought to myself, ’Could you do this in front of them?’” He walked home, leaving his dream behind. “I wasn’t brave enough.”
In his late teens he spent a few years working at a law firm, the gift of the gab getting him an apprenticeship before they eventually offered him a full time job, but in the back of his head he always knew there would be something else. Every Thursday he’d go to a local acting school in secret. “It was like the first thing I’d done for myself, and just didn’t tell anyone,” he says. Soon, his mom had started to wonder what he’d been doing. “I’m going to be a fucking actor,” he remembers shouting. And she retorted with a line so significant that it’s now tattooed on his forearm: “Your head’s full of magic.” She’s now one of his biggest supporters.
Soon after, when he turned 21, Moore retired from boxing. “I realized that I’d missed out on things, like staying at my mates’ houses and hanging out.” His grandad would always quietly remind him, away from view: Your name’s gonna be in lights, but not for boxing.
It turns out his grandad was right. Moore locked in, determined to make the acting thing work. Through his acting school, he hustled for an agent, booked short films, TV gigs and, eventually, the male lead in the first season of Vampire Academy. Earlier this year he appeared in the ITV series Code of Silence, about a deaf woman with incredible lipreading skills assisting the police in tracking down criminal gangs. Moore plays Liam, the tricky figure she gets close to. He earned warm reviews for his part in that too.
But if he’s existed on the periphery of the storied Brit Boy actor cognoscenti for a while, it feels like a move like Blue Film, modest in stature but commanding in audacity, might shift things for him. And who knows? Maybe when Blue Film meets an audience—fingers crossed, sometime soon—it’ll take his career in a new, unpredictable direction. He smiles and repeats that mantra: “Dangerous artist or famous actor? Which one?”
