Kieron Moore's Next Opponent

Competitive boxing is an unusual launch pad for an acting career, but it's worked out well for Kieron Moore, who started throwing punches on the English amateur circuit when he was ten.

By age twenty-one, after more than seventy-five matches at home and abroad, he was ready for something new. Training had meant passing up chances to audition for school productions (he regrets missing Grease), but he wanted to pursue acting.

"Kieron Moore," his mother responded, "your head is full of magic."

Moore didn't feel his career switch was all that odd. "Boxing is art in a raw form," he says. "It's a dance, and it verges on existentialism – competing with yourself, realizing your limitations. You train beyond what you are, so there's a sense of illusion, too. But in acting, I don't get punched in the face."

Enrollment at the Manchester School of Acting turned out to be tough in other ways, though, testing both his belief in himself and in his dream. Fortunately, when self-confidence began to waver, a teacher and acting coach named Mark Hudson came to his rescue, providing needed emotional and financial support.

Since that time, Moore has turned to Hudson for help at every step of his acting career, from prepping for auditions to shaping new characters — including his latest, Dimitri Belikov, the male lead in Vampire Academy, premiering September 15 on Peacock.

Moore channels Hudson in playing the stoic Dimitri, a guardian of vampire royalty who is also training the next generation to become bodyguards. And he gets to use some of his old boxing skills (though he never had to fight with silver stakes in the past).

"The danger in the role is that it's so internal," Moore says. "What is Dimitri keeping in? How does it come out in his aggression? What is the physical toll? It's much more interesting to envision him as a man who's good at what he does, not by choice but by curse."

Given this emotional component, could Dimitri, in Colin Firth fashion, become the mercurial Mr. Darcy of Vampire Academy, a lover and also a fighter? Maybe. "I'll take that parallel all day, every day!" he says.

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #10, 2022, under the title, "Outside the Box."