From ‘Single Kiasi’ to ‘Bridgerton’ and Almost Joining ‘House of the Dragon’, Lenana Kariba’s Greatest Role Is Fatherhood

In the first few minutes you chat to Lenana Kariba, you’ll realise two things. One, he smells really great, even on a warm February afternoon when the Nairobi sun is most unforgiving. And secondly, and perhaps the most endearing thing about him, he’s a girl dad.

He quickly checks in on his daughter when we sit down for this interview and smiles in that unguarded way fathers do when they speak of their daughters. “My brother is watching her at the moment. And she’s just fallen asleep,” he tells me.

The Kenyan actor, who now resides in the U.K., has become a rarer presence on local screens, though the few projects he has appeared in, like Single Kiasi and Kash Money, have been popular with audiences.

He’s back in Kenya briefly, as he does every so often, to rest and spend time with family. The irony is that I also catch him at one of the buzziest moments of his career: having just featured in the fourth season of Bridgerton, one of Netflix’s biggest global franchises, with its first three seasons ranking among the platform’s most-watched English-language series.

The new season has just dropped, and from every corner of the internet, Kenyans are flooding his comments with congratulatory messages. “You mean you were breathing the same air as Lady Danbury,” one user writes. Another comments: “As a Kenyan who religiously watched Bridgerton from season one, I’m so proud that a Kenyan is in the cast.”

The attention is humbling for Kariba but also somewhat overwhelming because, to him, the moment doesn’t feel nearly as monumental as it does to everyone else.

“After I put up the post, it just went crazy, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is what I was afraid of.’ I mean, I didn’t want to downplay it but then again, this is just background work,” Kariba says.

In Bridgerton, he plays one of the royal footmen – the background attendants who serve the monarchy, in this case Queen Charlotte.

For an actor who spent his early years charming hearts as an afro-rocking leading man in some of Kenya’s biggest productions of the 2010s, including Kenya’s first-ever medical drama, Saints, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Kariba would view his role on Bridgerton as little more than background work.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate it. I was just like, ‘Why is everyone making such a big deal about this little thing that I did?’” he says.

But for Kenyans online and those around him, like his wife – who rewatched the season three times – the role meant far more than he had realised.

“My wife dropped everything just to watch the new season,” says Kariba. “When we got to the scenes I appeared in, she paused the episode and told me, ‘Do not downplay this. I know you, and I know you’re going to downplay this when you talk about it and make it seem like, “I’m just a background actor, you can barely see me.” This moment we’re watching you right now on one of Netflix’s biggest shows ever is one of the most amazing things that has ever happened and I need you to recognise that for a minute.’”

It’s the kind of perspective that Kariba needed to make sense of everyone’s reaction, to understand it and accept it. “I think the more I was reading the comments from people, and I read every single comment, I was like, ‘Yeah, I get it,’” he says.

When he auditioned for Bridgerton in 2025, he didn’t know what show or role he was being considered for throughout the entire process. “They try to keep it very quiet that even the project has a code name.”

It was only during the costume fitting that he learned he would be playing a “royal footman,” though it was his wife who pieced it all together. Kariba describes her as a “huge fan of Bridgerton,” unlike him, who had never watched the show before his casting.

“I knew of the show and I knew it was a big hit, but I wasn’t a fan and had never watched it,” says Kariba. “After my costume fitting, my wife convinced me to watch just one episode and within no time, we had binged the first three seasons. And just like that, I became a fan.”

Kariba describes his time on the Bridgerton set as an “amazing experience” and “such a grand-scale production,” unlike anything he’s used to. And while he never got the chance to meet Shonda Rhimes in person, he did meet Golda Rosheuvel, who plays Queen Charlotte, as well as almost all of the Bridgertons except Jonathan Bailey (who portrays Anthony Bridgerton). He even met Lady Whistledown herself, Penelope Featherington, whose love story was the main focus of season three.

“She’s very tiny, smaller than you think, but she’s so sweet,” he says. “Everyone was just so nice and they actually come up and greet you, especially if you’re in the same scene with them, even if you’re not interacting.”

Bridgerton isn’t the first role that Kariba has landed since his move to the U.K. in 2023. At one point, he auditioned for the role of a soldier – another background role – on HBO’s House of the Dragon.

“I got a callback for House of the Dragon but I ended up not doing it because of how demanding it was going to be for me at the time,” he says.

Game of Thrones is considered one of the greatest and most culturally significant television series of all time. Its prequel, House of the Dragon, is hardly the kind of opportunity anyone would let pass up. But for Kariba, the progression of his acting career has mattered less than his role as a father. In fact, he considers fatherhood his greatest role yet, and for his three-year-old daughter, Ava, he wouldn’t trade his commitment and presence for anything else.

“When I moved to the U.K., I had a plan to get more involved in acting, maybe go to acting school, work hard at getting more auditions and all that kind of stuff,” he says. “But then I became a dad and it just felt like none of that mattered anymore. I felt like I knew where I wanted to be now. So I put all those plans on hold and decided that this is what I wanted to do, and that’s what I do – raise my daughter. I love acting and I’ll never stop, obviously, but being a dad has changed how I see that part of my world and what I want to do with my career.”

It’s for this very reason that he’s currently only signed to background casting agencies because the work would be “a little bit less,” as he puts it. “That means I can still do what I love but also continue doing what I love at home.”

I wonder if we’ll ever see him dominate Kenyan screens the way he did in the 2010s. Probably not, though there’s a good chance we might see him again in Single Kiasi, should there be a fifth season. “Other than Single Kiasi, you’ll realise I’m not actively taking any new work in Nairobi,” he says.

What I wonder more, however, is what this means for his career in the U.K., and whether, should the opportunity for a much bigger role come along, he’ll be ready to take it.

We spend the next couple of minutes talking about Mission: Impossible, Tom Cruise and how the perfect role for him at the moment, if he were ever to find it, would be a “big movie where he’s there but really not there.”

“Like a sidekick, and not really a main character?” I ask.

“Yeah, like I’m not the Tom Cruise but I could be a sidekick or the guy in the chair like Benji. Remember he used to be the guy in the chair before he became a field agent?” he tells me.

I’ve interviewed many Kenyan actors but not many are as reluctant to be considered a star, or rather, a celebrity, as Kariba. “A lot of people don’t know this about me but I don’t like the attention and the limelight. Not in a bad way, it’s just not who I am,” he says. “Can you imagine not being able to do the things I love because I’m popular? It’s just so terrible, especially when you’re a dad. I’m here just trying to protect my daughter and have a normal life.”

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