George Ferrier: The Kiwi Actor Who Booked a Netflix Hit From His Bedroom and Then Went to RADA

Most people discover George Ferrier through a Google search after watching The Hunting Wives and wanting to know who the kid with the cheekbones is. Fair enough. But here’s the part that actually tells you something real: he sent a self-tape from New Zealand, landed a lead role opposite Malin Akerman and Brittany Snow, relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina to film it, and then the show became one of Netflix’s biggest hits of summer 2025. Oh — and he also trained at RADA. And Stella Adler. And he paints.

Table of Contents

Quick Bio

Detail	Info
Full Name	George Ferrier
Born	November 17, 2000 — Auckland, New Zealand
Age	24 (as of 2025)
Height	5’8″ (1.73m)
Nationality	New Zealander
School	Auckland Grammar School (all-boys; hockey captain U15; lead musical roles)
Training	Stella Adler Studio of Acting; RADA Shakespeare Program graduate
First Credit	One Year Later (short film, 2011) — age 11
Breakout Film	Juniper (2021) — opposite Charlotte Rampling
Key TV Roles	Leo (Dirty Laundry, 2016); TJ Forrester (One of Us Is Lying, 2021–22); Jordan (Sweet Tooth, 2023–24); Brad (The Hunting Wives, 2025–26)
Upcoming	Don’t Kill Loretta (thriller); The Hunting Wives Season 2 (2026)
Other Interests	Visual art — paintings exhibited at Mohilef Studios, Los Angeles (2024)
Base	Los Angeles, California

He Started at Eleven and Nobody Really Noticed Until Charlotte Rampling

Let’s back up. 2011. George Ferrier is eleven years old in Auckland and he makes a short film called One Year Later. Nobody outside New Zealand cares about this. Fine. He kept going anyway.

He landed his first real recurring role in 2016 — Leo in the New Zealand TV drama Dirty Laundry, eight episodes, actual character work. He’s fifteen. By 2019 he’s doing the thing a lot of young actors do: showing up in one-episode cameo roles, trying to get noticed. He pops up as literally “Trendy Guy” in a single Power Rangers Beast Morphers episode that year. The industry was not exactly rolling out a red carpet for him.

Then 2021 happened and everything shifted.

Juniper Was the Real First Chapter

This is the role that changed the trajectory. Juniper is a quiet, emotionally demanding New Zealand drama about a troubled teenage boy named Sam who gets packed off to care for his deeply difficult, alcoholic grandmother Ruth. Charlotte Rampling plays Ruth. Charlotte Rampling — one of the most respected actresses in British cinema, nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA winner — plays opposite a twenty-year-old from Auckland making his feature film debut.

The film earned him real critical attention. One reviewer wrote that he was a “new face in New Zealand films” who made a “striking impression” — specifically calling out his ability to convey bitterness and a sense of self-destruction that felt genuinely earned rather than performed. They added that for the film to land the way it needed to, both actors had to carry their weight equally, and Ferrier delivered.

That review matters. It’s the kind of writing about a young actor that agents bookmark and use to get the next audition. Greenwich Entertainment picked up the film for international theatrical release. Suddenly George Ferrier had a film credit that could open doors.

Then COVID Made Him a Netflix Actor by Default

Here’s the funny thing. Two of his biggest roles came to him specifically because big American productions relocated their filming to New Zealand during the pandemic, which meant suddenly there was a pool of international-quality work available right in his backyard.

One of Us Is Lying — the Peacock teen mystery-drama based on Karen M. McManus’s bestselling novel — filmed in Auckland. Ferrier gets cast as TJ Forrester, Jake’s best friend, across eight episodes spanning both seasons (2021 and 2022). It’s not the lead, but it’s a consistent recurring presence on a show with a genuinely large young audience.

Sweet Tooth — the Netflix post-apocalyptic fantasy series produced by Team Downey (Robert Downey Jr.’s production company) — also films in New Zealand. He books Jordan, appearing across ten episodes from 2023 to 2024. Two seasons. A show with actual global viewership numbers. He was racking up significant streaming credits while still essentially based at home.

The pandemic accidentally accelerated his international career. You could call it luck. You could also point out that “luck” doesn’t explain why he kept booking these things while other local actors didn’t.

Auckland Grammar School: Lead musician and hockey captain

The Auckland Grammar School detail matters more than it might seem. It’s one of New Zealand’s most prestigious all-boys secondary schools — academically rigorous, culturally competitive, the kind of place where you either figure out who you are or spend years pretending to be someone else.

Ferrier was captain of the under-15 hockey team. He also played rugby and tennis. And he took the lead roles in school productions. In a 2022 interview with Auckland Grammar TV, he said he’d known he wanted to be an actor from a young age — and that the school’s theatrical productions were where the ambition solidified from wish into plan.

Sports and arts together. Athletic discipline and performance instinct. That combination shows up in how he carries himself on screen — there’s a physical assurance to his presence that reads as natural rather than trained, even though he’s very much trained.

He Did the Work: Stella Adler and RADA

This is the bit that separates someone building a real career from someone who got lucky with a face and a casting director. After establishing himself in New Zealand, Ferrier went and did the formal training.

Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York. One of the most respected acting schools in America — the methodology focuses on imagination and given circumstances rather than personal emotional recall, which is a very different approach from most American training. He completed study there.

Then he went to RADA — the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London — and graduated from their Shakespeare program. The RADA Shakespeare program specifically means mastering heightened language, verse speaking, and classical technique. It’s not a weekend workshop. It’s serious conservatory training.

So when people see him in The Hunting Wives and wonder how a 24-year-old from Auckland handles scenes opposite Malin Akerman with that level of composure — Stella Adler and RADA are part of the answer. He put in the infrastructure.

The Hunting Wives: From Self-Tape to Netflix Lead

The casting story for The Hunting Wives is genuinely worth knowing. His agent Liz Delaney from Odd Talent Management confirmed that Ferrier submitted a self-tape audition from New Zealand. No in-person callback. A self-tape. From his home country. And he got the role.

Think about what that means practically. He’s competing against American actors who can walk into a casting office in LA or New York. He’s a Kiwi, based in Auckland, sending a video of himself performing scenes for a US drama being produced by Lionsgate Television and 3 Arts Entertainment. He wins the role. He then relocates to Charlotte, North Carolina on roughly a week’s notice to start filming.

The show is based on May Cobb’s 2021 novel of the same name, adapted for Netflix by showrunner Rebecca Cutter. It premieres July 21, 2025 to immediate attention — reviews describe it as “bonkers” and “deliciously trashy” in the best possible way. Eight episodes. Full season. Ferrier plays Brad Thompson in every single one.

Who Is Brad Thompson, Exactly?

Brad Thompson is a walking contradiction written to make viewers deeply uncomfortable in ways they didn’t expect from a pulp thriller. On the surface: the perfect all-American (well, all-Texan) boy. Rich. Athletic. Handsome. About to head to Baylor University. Son of a reverend’s wife.

Underneath: keeper of significant secrets. His relationship with his mother Jill has what the NZ Herald’s Spy column described as an “emotionally incestuous” quality that the show doesn’t shy away from. He’s also carrying on an affair with Margo — his mother’s close friend, played by Malin Akerman — that he shows every sign of wanting to continue.

The girlfriend, Abby, gets murdered. The season finale reveals Margo killed her. Brad’s world collapses. The second season has already been confirmed and is being produced.

Malin Akerman was asked about the affair storyline directly. She told Us Weekly that the controversy was specifically what drew her to the material, but she was also clear that the show was intentional about making Brad 18 — “technically” of age, as she put it, while acknowledging it was “very young” and “cutting it real close.” Whether that line-walking is compelling drama or just calculated edginess is a fair debate. What isn’t debatable is that the storyline generated genuine viewer investment.

He Paints. And That’s Not a Side Note.

In 2024 — the year before The Hunting Wives launched and made him recognizable to a mainstream audience — George Ferrier exhibited his paintings at Mohilef Studios in Los Angeles. He shared the work on Instagram. Real paintings, real gallery showing, real artistic identity separate from his acting career.

This is the kind of thing that either gets dismissed as a celebrity hobby or gets understood as evidence of a creative person who thinks visually and takes the work seriously. His acting agency bio explicitly mentions it. His Instagram occasionally features the work.

Plenty of actors paint as therapy or relaxation. Ferrier treated it seriously enough to exhibit. That’s a different thing.

Don’t Kill Loretta and What Comes Next

Beyond Season 2 of The Hunting Wives — already confirmed and set to premiere in 2026 — Ferrier has wrapped a lead role in an upcoming thriller called Don’t Kill Loretta. Details on the project are thin, but the fact that he booked a lead role in a feature film while simultaneously closing out one Netflix season and preparing for another suggests the career is moving at real velocity.

He’s based in Los Angeles now. The self-tape-from-Auckland era worked for what it was, but LA is where the next chapter gets written. He’s 24 years old with Stella Adler training, a RADA diploma, a Charlotte Rampling co-star credit, three significant Netflix series, and a lead role in one of the summer’s most-talked-about shows.

The infrastructure is genuinely impressive for someone this age.

The Controversy That Wasn’t Really About Him

When The Hunting Wives started generating buzz, some of that buzz was specifically about whether the Margo-and-Brad affair storyline was appropriate viewing material. Akerman addressed it head-on. The writers addressed it by making Brad canonically 18. The show addressed it by leaning fully into the discomfort as a feature rather than trying to sanitize it.

Here’s the thing: George Ferrier is not the controversy. He’s an actor who played a character in a script as written. The debate about whether the age-gap storyline was handled responsibly is a conversation about the show’s creative choices, not about the person performing the role. The distinction matters and it sometimes gets blurred in social media discourse around content like this.

The fact that he handled the material with enough craft that it reads as genuinely unsettling rather than gratuitous is, ironically, the argument that he did his job well.

Final Words

Here’s where I land on George Ferrier. He is exactly the kind of actor you want to have tracked before they become so famous that writing about them feels like you’re just recapping their Wikipedia page.

He started at eleven. He trained seriously at two of the most respected acting institutions on the planet. He built a career through a pandemic by working on productions that came to his country rather than waiting until he could afford to move. He got to Charlotte on a week’s notice for an audition he won on a self-tape. He paints and exhibits the work. He’s 24.

The critical notice from Juniper wasn’t wrong. Handsome, charismatic, convincing darkness under the surface — that’s a toolkit that the industry pays enormous amounts of money to find. When the right role fully unlocks what he can do, and it hasn’t completely happened yet, the conversation about George Ferrier is going to get significantly louder.

You heard it now, or you’ll hear it later. Might as well be now.

FAQs

1. Who is George Ferrier?

George Ferrier is a New Zealand actor born November 17, 2000, in Auckland. He rose to wider international attention through Juniper (2021), opposite Charlotte Rampling, and has since appeared in One of Us Is Lying, Sweet Tooth, and The Hunting Wives (2025) on Netflix. He trained at Stella Adler in New York and graduated from RADA’s Shakespeare program in London.

2. What is George Ferrier in?

His notable credits are: Dirty Laundry (NZ TV, 2016) as Leo; Kiwi Christmas (2017) as Dick; One Year Later (short, 2011); Power Rangers Beast Morphers (2019) as Trendy Guy; Juniper (2021) as Sam; One of Us Is Lying (Peacock, 2021–22) as TJ Forrester across 8 episodes; Sweet Tooth (Netflix, 2023–24) as Jordan across 10 episodes; and The Hunting Wives (Netflix, 2025–26) as Brad Thompson across all 8 episodes. He also has Don’t Kill Loretta upcoming.

3. Where is George Ferrier from?

Auckland, New Zealand. He grew up there, attended Auckland Grammar School, and built his early career on local productions and international projects that filmed in New Zealand. He has since relocated to Los Angeles.

4. How did George Ferrier get cast in The Hunting Wives?

He submitted a self-tape audition from New Zealand. His agent Liz Delaney of Odd Talent Management confirmed this to the NZ Herald. After booking the role, Ferrier relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina within a week to begin filming.

5. What school did George Ferrier attend?

Auckland Grammar School, one of New Zealand’s most prestigious all-boys secondary schools. He was captain of the under-15 hockey team and took the leading roles in school theatrical productions. He has also played rugby and tennis.

6. Did George Ferrier go to acting school?

Yes — two significant programs. He trained at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York, and he graduated from the Shakespeare program at RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) in London. Both are among the most respected acting institutions in the world.

7. What is George Ferrier’s character Brad in The Hunting Wives?

Brad Thompson is the son of socialite Jill and the boyfriend of murder victim Abby. He has a secretive, emotionally intense relationship with his mother and is carrying on an affair with Margo Banks (Malin Akerman), one of his mother’s closest friends. He’s 18 in the narrative, planning to attend Baylor University. The season finale reveals Margo killed Abby, leaving Brad’s story wide open for Season 2.

8. Is The Hunting Wives getting a second season?

Yes. Netflix renewed it in September 2025 for a second season, which is in production as of 2026. George Ferrier also has an IMDB credit listed for a 2026 episode.

9. How old was George Ferrier when he started acting?

In the 2011 short film One Year Later, he made an appearance at the age of eleven. His first significant recurring TV role came in 2016 with Dirty Laundry.

10. What did critics say about George Ferrier in Juniper?

One review described him as a “new face in New Zealand films” who made a “striking impression” — specifically noting his ability to project genuine bitterness and self-destructive energy. The review concluded that his ability to hold the screen equally opposite Charlotte Rampling was essential to the film working, and that he delivered.

11. Is George Ferrier an artist beyond acting?

Yes. He creates visual art — paintings — and in 2024 had his work exhibited at Mohilef Studios in Los Angeles. He shares his paintings on Instagram intermittently. His talent agency bio includes it as part of his profile.

12. What is Don’t Kill Loretta?

An upcoming thriller in which George Ferrier has a lead role. As of mid-2026, specific plot details and a release date have not been publicly announced. His management and agency bio list it as a recently wrapped project.

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