Drake

Aubrey Drake Graham was earning about fifty dollars a day when a blank round changed his destiny on a Toronto set. It was the year 2004, and his character on the teen series Degrassi: The Next Generation was shot dead in the school hallway. That wheelchair storyline tied him to fiction for 145 episodes spread across seven seasons.

But the Canadian public television salary barely covered his mother's medical bills. By day he memorized scripts for teen shows, and by night he recorded rap demos in a damp basement. In 2007, the show's producers discovered his late-night escapes to the recording studio and made him choose between the cameras and the microphone.

No one in the offices believed that the soft-spoken kid could rhyme for real.

So Drake left the series in 2008 with his bank account nearly empty. Shortly after, he signed with Lil Wayne's label and channeled the visual machinery he had learned on film sets into his music videos. Every music video he made worked like a short commercial, where the aesthetics mattered as much as the audio track.

The London Rescue and a Sharp Eye

For years, the public typecast him as a musician who had come from cheap acting. But in 2014, Drake discovered a British series about street drug dealers called Top Boy in his hotel room. Channel 4 had canceled it after two brilliant seasons, and that struck him as a colossal mistake.

Drake contacted his partner Adel Nur to track down the original creators and buy the broadcast rights. It took three years of meetings in London offices before they convinced Netflix to revive the project. In 2019, the series returned to screens with Drake as executive producer and a budget four times larger.

And the move paid off perfectly.

International critics applauded the raw edge of the new episodes without suspecting that the financial boost came from a hip hop star. Drake understood that producing fiction wasn't about appearing on promotional posters but about giving screenwriters total freedom.

The Hollywood Boardroom Takeover

In 2019, he doubled down on his audiovisual presence by teaming up with Sam Levinson to launch Euphoria on HBO. The series, about addiction and teen pain, sparked fiery debate from its first episode, yet it piled up twenty-five Emmy Award nominations in just two seasons. His production company, DreamCrew, brought financial muscle and a sharp vision of youth consumption.

His move into serious film came almost immediately. In 2020 he financed the horror satire Spree, and in 2022 he served as executive producer on Amsterdam, the period film directed by David O. Russell that brought together Christian Bale and Margot Robbie. The movie cost 80 million dollars in production budget and grossed just over 31 million in theaters worldwide.

The box office stumble didn't stop the machine.

In 2024 he signed on to back the television adaptation of Neuromancer for Apple TV, after closing the final season of Top Boy with a BAFTA for Best Drama. DreamCrew's contracts include a technical clause that bars any lead actor credit on his own film projects.