Ncuti Gatwa

Born around October 15, 1992, Ncuti Gatwa's family fled Rwanda during the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi, subsequently settling in Scotland. He spent his formative years in Edinburgh and Dunfermline, attending Boroughmuir High School and Dunfermline High School. Gatwa later relocated to Glasgow to pursue higher education at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Acting in 2013. The Conservatoire recognized his achievements by awarding him an honorary doctorate at its 2022 graduation ceremony. Gatwa commenced his professional acting career on stage at the Dundee Repertory Theatre. His performance as Mercutio in a 2014 production of Romeo & Juliet at the HOME arts centre in Manchester garnered him an Ian Charleson Award nomination. He achieved widespread recognition for his breakout role as the gay teenager Eric Effiong in the Netflix comedy-drama series Sex Education, which premiered in 2019. This role earned him a BAFTA Scotland Award for Best Actor in Television and three BAFTA Television Award nominations for Best Male Comedy Performance. In 2022, Gatwa was announced as the fifteenth incarnation of the title role in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, making history as the first black actor, the fourth Scottish actor, and the first actor born outside the United Kingdom to lead the series. He publicly identified as queer in an August 2023 interview.