Frankline Otara felt drawn to watching others act in shows, and after learning that his mother couldn’t fulfill her passion for acting, he decided to step into the spotlight for her.
“(Acting) could not work out (for her) since she had no resources, so I decided to make her dream come true,” Otara wrote in an email.
Otara, who also goes by Cranky Usher, is currently in school, pursuing a diploma in Broadcasting in Journalism and Mass Media at Rift Valley Institute of Business Studies in Nakuru Town, Kenya. He is from Kisii, Kenya, but moved to Nakuru for school, while most of his family still lives in the countryside.
In a Zoom call, he appeared with bright pink walls behind him, dressed in a dark button-up shirt and light blue blazer. When later asked why the walls were that color, he laughed and said “the owner of the houses is the one who painted them pink and I just rented a room some months ago.” He said he pays $33.98 USD monthly for the rent, which may seem cheap to those in the United States where rents can easily be $1500/month or more, but it’s difficult for him to afford since he isn’t able to have a job while in school.
“Here you have to go to school, finish school, then look for work,” he says, “you can’t work when you are in school, you can’t, it’s very difficult” and feels “so broke” sometimes. He feels he needs to “trust the system” though and is hopeful he’ll be able to find a job once he graduates, ideally as a reporter, actor or camera operator for a media house in Kenya. Otara also likes being behind the camera and helps with the recording during school events.
When acting Otara enjoys being the main character. In his last role he “played a boyfriend who was caught cheating” for a film by Joseph Oyugi and sent a clip.
The scene begins with tense music. Otara and another actor sit across from each other at a café table. The betrayed girlfriend shows Otara’s character a phone with incriminating text messages on the screen. “I have the evidence,” she says in the clip. As Otara’s character looks at the phone he takes a breath and says, “I’m sorry.” The ex-girlfriend character becomes angrier and says heatedly, “After everything… my best friend!” She gets up from her chair as Otara pleads with her saying it was “just a mistake” and to give him a second chance. She takes her glass of orange juice and splashes it in his face before walking away.
When asked about the scene Otara says that even though he knew he was just acting he still felt “embarrassed” with the orange juice scene, and that it’s something to get used to since it’s his career.
While Otara says the movie industry in Kenya has “a lot of fun and freedom,” he says it’s also difficult to get into the industry unless you have connections. Many people “do it for fun” rather than professionally, he says, so it’s tricky to try to make a career out of it.
Besides looking up to local actors in Kenya, someone Otara feels is his “mentor” in movie production is the character Thomas Shelby, played by Cillian Murphy, in Peaky Blinders. CharacTour gives the assessment of Thomas Shelby as “stoic, calculating, and ambitious.” While it may be difficult to make it as an actor in Kenya, it’s something Otara feels passionately for and says he loves.
For his future, living in America is not out of the question, though he says he’s happy to be Kenyan. He laughed as he referred to the people of the “superpower” country as having “superpowers” themselves, then said more seriously, “I love America.”
Otara says his mother smiles when they talk about his acting and says he’s “doing really great.” One day he’d like to see himself on Netflix or in movies and says, “That’s the dream.”