Chuku Modu

The leap from Hammersmith

Chuku Modu wasn't desperate to get in front of the camera. In 2012, he enrolled at Richmond Drama School to understand the craft, and just four years later he was sharing a set with Emilia Clarke.

His arrival in the sixth season of Game of Thrones in 2016 wasn't a leading role, but it gave him a sense of the scale of major productions. He played Aggo, a Dothraki warrior tasked with guarding the queen across a scorching desert.

The industry took notice.

During that same period, he appeared in the film Me Before You in a supporting role as a waiter. But the real shift came when he crossed the Atlantic to land a role in a California hospital.

In 2017, he joined the original cast of The Good Doctor, playing Dr. Jared Kalu. He was the resident who provided emotional contrast to the main character's rigidity, and his exit from the series after the first season surprised fans.

The negotiated exit from San José

Many actors are afraid to leave a hit TV show in its first year. But Modu chose to pursue other kinds of roles before getting stuck in the hallways of a fictional hospital.

And the gamble paid off.

In 2019, he entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Captain Marvel. He played Soh-Larr, a Kree spy who ends up playing a key role in an ambush within the plot.

That same year, he joined the sci-fi series The 100 for its sixth season. He played Gabriel Santiago, a complex character who grapples with immortality and scientific ethics in a post-apocalyptic setting.

He filmed 28 episodes of this teen drama before the series officially ended in 2020.

Mud and Prehistory

Modu has always been drawn to projects that demand real physical endurance. In 2022, he starred in the horror survival film Out of Darkness, shot in the Scottish Highlands under extreme weather conditions.

The story is set 45,000 years ago, and it required the actor to learn an invented language for the production. Filming was done almost entirely in natural light and with fire to keep the Stone Age setting historically faithful.

In 2023, the actor decided to close a professional chapter he had left open years earlier.

She reprised her role as Jared Kalu in The Good Doctor during the sixth season to rejoin the main storyline. Her return was framed as an arc of professional redemption that ran through the series finale in May 2024.

The production of her latest season had an estimated budget of $5 million per episode.