Tony Kgoroge on the fight to become an actor, the freedom he’s chased ever since, and the prison boss role pulling that same feeling to the surface.
Katlego Sekhu
Tony Kgoroge recently joined Fresh Fridays on Kaya Breakfast for an honest conversation about family, freedom, and his most demanding role yet.
Long before Moses, before Netflix’s Umthetho, there was a different kind of sentence hanging over Kgoroge’s future. His father wanted a lawyer in the family, not an actor.
“The decisions that I had to make between doing dramatic arts and my dad forcing me to be a lawyer, it was crazy for me, trying to convince this guy for over a year,” Kgoroge says.
His mother tipped the scales. He enrolled anyway, steered clear of anything legal, and still, even a single year down the wrong path stayed with him.
“At first, felt like a prison,” he says of that year. “I did first year and I’m like, okay, so I must do first year, second year. So I got two first years under my belt.”
That early pull between duty and desire still shapes how he defines freedom.
“The sense that you can be able to do what you love, at whatever time and however you want to do it, that is freedom,” he says.
It’s that same tension, between what confines a person and what sets them free, that drew him to Moses, the prison boss he plays in Umthetho, the long lost brother of a public prosecutor, still running a network from behind bars.
To prepare, Kgoroge spoke to former inmates, including one who had spent more than 18 years inside. He filmed inside a working prison and insisted on doing his own stunts, unwilling to let a stunt double flatten the character’s smaller, more human details.
“The stunt person won’t be able to capture that,” he says.
What he took from the role was less about craft than about how fragile a life can turn. “Life is so fragile,” he says. “You have to treat it with kid gloves. If anything slips, you can either go for the worst, or you can come back and become the greatest person in life.”
To hear the full interview, listen to the podcast.
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