Kagiso Lediga

Kagiso Lediga (born May 6, 1978) is a South African actor, comedian, filmmaker and writer. He is the creator and executive producer of the Netflix crime drama Queen Sono. Quotes People would offer us tea and biscuits while we listened to their stories, No disrespect to my dad but in my head, selling insurance became the backup plan for my life if every other thing I was interested in failed. Looking back, I should have appreciated the training a bit more but at the time I thought it was s***, certainly not the Spike Lee stuff that I wanted. With streamers, there has been a lot of trial and error and I commend Netflix because they have been groundbreaking in that regard,” he tells Al Jazeera via Zoom from New York. Trying to figure out content for a diverse continent such as ours is tough. And with Queen Sono that was always on our minds. We have 1.5 billion people in this space, and this chick from Johannesburg navigating these complexities. It was a window into these different cultures. Queen Sono opened a lot of doors. I still think it is an awesome idea and would like to see a film. It is a fun world and if the stars align, maybe we can do one or two movies just to wrap things up properly. When I began to find success as a creative, I upgraded my backup plan to working in advertising. I suppose if I a** out, I could always find work somewhere peddling ideas for selling toothpaste. I know this is bad and will probably come back to haunt me. I don’t even know how I came across these films in the townships of Pretoria. I don’t know what you know about Pretoria but that is the headquarters of apartheid. It was an interesting place to grow up, very insular. Going to UCT was a crazy opening up of the world. I had run out of the three-year target that I had given myself to make it work because of my mum’s limited finances, I wasn’t excelling academically, but I could not tell my mum I was kicked out, so I had to appeal and once I was allowed back in, I never went back. I grew up towards the end of apartheid so standup was a great cultural ice breaker because I was doing comedy for mostly rich white audiences. At this time there had never really been a conversation going on between whites and Blacks so it was always this fun adrenalin rush to go into rooms full, of people who didn’t quite know if I was doing protest theatre or plain comedy. It would be awkward at first, but they would slowly get into it. How Kagiso Lediga became the most sought-after filmmaker in South Africa, February 24 2024 Category:Comedians Category:1978 births Category:1970s Category:People from South Africa