Shona Ferguson Is Building A Legacy One Block At A Time

Following his return to the small screen in the action-packed six-part series Kings of Jo’burg, the actor and businessman talks to GQ about wealth and being part of a Netflix African Series

- Nare Kekana

GQ: Tell us about the show and your collab with Netflix?

Shona Ferguson: We started developing the show about four years ago, and usually it doesn’t have a name yet at that stage. So, you come up with an idea based on a premise. I began with an idea that I wanted to develop a show called Kings of Jo’burg, and took it from there.

Pretty much every project our company had done had been female-centric – that was the latest craze on TV in South Africa. A lot of content is female-driven, but we needed to do something different. It’s a great direction, going back to something that people did in the past, something male-dominated for an audience mostly comprised of women who don’t want to watch guys beating each other up and chasing each other with guns. We wanted to tell a story to which everyone can relate.

I had to humanise guys who are usually considered macho, so I wrote it down as I saw it in my head. Then, I set up a meeting with a brilliant scriptwriter, Linda Bere, for a female perspective.

GQ: How is this character different from those you’ve played before?

SF: I’ve been typecast in similar roles for the past four years on The Queen, so people wouldn’t have expected me to play that character. I never expected to be in Kings of Jo’burg. It was when we were casting that the show’s director suggested I do something different, and that’s how I jumped into playing Simon “Vader” Masire.