Kieron Moore has always been a performer. As a child, growing up in Manchester, he put on personas of who he was told he should be, none of them ever fully him. "I felt like I was always trying to fit into a mould or not be seen," he tells me. "I wanted to be special, but at the same time, I was quite happy to just survive, to get by without getting picked on that day." 

Moore, whose dad is a boxing coach, became a competitive boxer at the age of 10 out of a desire to be him. That’s important – he didn’t want to be like his father, he wanted to be him. “I was quite infatuated with how the world treated my dad and how he carried himself in it,” he reflects. “I was such a fragile little boy, and he was the epitome of masculinity, so I wanted to feel like that. I think the only way to feel it is to replicate it.” 

He was drawn to the showmanship of boxing, rather than merely the sport itself. He loved the performance of it, and he was great at playing to the crowd. It was also through his dad, inadvertently, that he fell into another passion: poetry. His dad never shared his own poems, but Moore would find them hidden in Christmas cards or scribbled on post-its for his mum around the house. I ask if his dad knew he discovered these literary gifts, but Moore never brought it up. “I guess it was his secret, but in hindsight it makes me pity him a little bit, he had all this stuff that he just couldn't say.” It’s taught Moore to never hold back; he never wants to regret not saying what he’s feeling. 

Despite his passion for writing, he ended up dropping out of college on a whim, “which was dumb,” he clarifies more than once. He fell into modelling for a while. He was broke, needed the work, and found he was good at it. And it makes sense: every shoot was a costume, a new persona. Moore doesn’t do things in half measures, so when he decided to model, he became passionate about it. Quickly, though, he realised it was harder to morph into what other people wanted him to be when he was relying solely on his looks. “You can’t really change it. That was hard for me to understand,” he says. 

In an attempt to find a “real” job, he started working at a law firm as a legal assistant. He was good at that too. It was, after all, another performance. Despite the firm being based in Manchester, they asked him to soften his accent when speaking to clients. There is something painful here, about class discrimination and accent bias, which has stuck with him. “My accent has been the burden of my existence,” he tells me at one point. It's why he still doesn't audition in his own accent and pushes back if he’s asked to use it after securing a role. “If I had sent the tape with my accent, they wouldn’t have given me the part.” And it’s true that many actors who manage to break out come from middle class backgrounds. That is, in part, due to unequal access to the arts and repeated funding cuts over the decades. But it’s also about perception – northern, working class accents are often seen, as Moore knows all too well, as unintelligent. 

Moore is anything but, and sometimes goes out of his way to prove it. “I was in a Prada shop recently, and I had my book in my back pocket, and then this woman came over to me and said, 'I love the book. Such a good accessory', and I was like, 'oh, I am actually reading it'. I felt this need to defend the fact I was reading this book. And I was catching myself thinking how insane it is that I'm having to say that. And then she made a joke and said to the guy that was working, 'get him more trousers that he can put books in'. It makes you timid. Feeling like I'm telling people to look at me. I'm not."

But he also came to the shoot today with a book in his jacket pocket. I wonder how many people clocked it on his journey here, how many looks he got, and whether he internalised those as praise or judgement. Because of his background and his image, he thinks people often assume he wouldn’t be a reader – he enjoys the idea of challenging that perception, the defiance of calling people out on their own prejudices. 

At the same time, maybe it ends up playing more on his mind than on anyone else’s. He pauses. "I think the worst thing is that most people don't care. It's got to a point where it's so talked about, I'm probably thinking about it more than them. And that's why, if anyone says about someone else, 'oh, but they're doing this performatively', I'm like, at least they're doing it. At least it made them pick up a book." It's a generous way of looking at it. 

For Moore, the performance and the thing itself have always been tangled up together anyway. He's maybe never been entirely sure where one ends and the other begins. I think back to what he said about his father’s masculinity: “I think the only way to feel it is to replicate it.”If you're performing as a reader, does that not allow you to become one? 

It was during his stint at the law firm that he finally decided to quit boxing, and thought, not for the first time, that he could give acting a go. “It was definitely the first real choice I made for myself,” he admits. For six months, every Thursday after work, unbeknownst to anyone in his life, he attended acting classes. Why he kept it secret is not entirely clear, but perhaps it’s a bit like his dad with the poetry – a vulnerability that must have been hard to shake at the time. 

One day his mum asked him where he had been, assuming that he was getting in trouble. He responded with the truth and told her he wanted to be an actor. “She said, ‘your head is full of fucking magic, mate’. We got into a huge argument. She was just scared, you know? She'd given up her dream to raise two kids. And I was an idiot back then,” he says. He speaks of his mum with a fondness that makes it clear how much he adores her. “She always encouraged me to be happy with nothing, to just enjoy life, enjoy your feelings. She was very much there for me.” After he got his first acting job, she wrote him a letter, and at the bottom it said, ‘your head's full of magic.’ Moore points at his left arm, where he’s tattooed the phrase in her handwriting. 

Since then, he’s kept his support circle close: his mum, his dad, his acting coach Mark, his agent Jo. His agent has been going through a lot in the last few years, and she’s had to miss much of Moore’s success because of it. For a moment, when talking about her, he goes somewhere quieter. When he asks me to include this in the piece he says, his voice tinged with equal parts sadness and admiration, “Jo thinks the world of me, I think it'd be nice if she knew that I thought the world of her as well.” 

After a string of roles that showed him the ropes – a music video for Maisie Peters, two short films and a couple of small speaking parts in Netflix shows – he landed the romantic lead in Peacock's Vampire Academy, which is where he met Louisa Connolly-Burnham. In fact, the reason I’m sitting outside with Moore today on one of the first real warm days of the year is because of Connolly-Burnham’s latest short film, The Intimacy Coordinator. We’re on set for Short Stuff’s cover shoot featuring the pair alongside the film’s two other co-stars, Sophie Simnett and Alexander Arnold. Last year, Moore received an email with the script and an offer attached. He was excited. “I'm lucky to know Louisa at this point in her journey, before she gets too big for me,” he laughs.

He stars as Max, an actor navigating the awkwardness of the intimacy coordinator on his current job (played by Connolly-Burnham) having an inappropriate infatuation with him. Despite sharing a profession, the similarities between Moore and his character are surface-level. “I don't want to play anything that's like Kieron, really. I’m Kieron every day,” he says. He had a very clear idea of Max in his head: a boyish, working class actor who is doing all the right things. Physically, Max was clean shaven, a look Moore rarely goes for in his everyday life. “As soon as my physicality is different, as soon as my body, my face or my hair looks a bit different, it's like a little trick on yourself to fall a bit more easily into it.” On set, he even wore a different aftershave to his usual one. This is clearly his favourite part: the character creation, the identity ideation. 

“I think with Max specifically, I'm intrigued to see the response to the issue that men can be made to feel uncomfortable, too, and it can come from their desires to be chivalrous and easy to work with,” he says. There is a thread to his choices. Again and again, it feels like he reaches for characters whose masculinity is in conflict with itself. Whether it’s his character in Netflix’s Boots, where he plays the bully to Miles Heizer’s closeted US marine, or a member of a criminal gang who falls in love with the person trying to catch him in ITV’s Code of Silence. “Masculinity is something that I’m still figuring out myself,” he tells me, “I think it’s reliance, support, dependency. But then it’s hard when you’re told that being those things makes you an act.”

His introspection isn’t accidental. Moore is someone who processes through language, particularly through writing. He journals every day. He’s got hundreds of poems written, almost ready to go for a collection if he wished. But he’s holding back a little, unsure of where to take them. In the meantime, he’s written a feature script, which he’s also keeping in his back pocket, “because it's a painful story, and I’m going to need the money to do it myself.” He’s thinking of starting work on a Henry Miller-esque novel of semi-autobiographical fiction. “I know what I want it to be, but I'm always kind of like, ‘Have I lived enough yet?’” He quotes Bukowski on growing young. How, as a kid, he couldn't wait to be a man, and now, at twenty-nine, he feels like a child. “I'm the youngest I've ever felt,” he says, “and I love that.”  

Moore sees language and learning about the world through writing and reading a useful tool. Not only professionally, but in his humanity. “I really want to be a great actor, but I want to be a good person at the end of the day.” That is an important mantra for Moore to have at this point in his career: he is on the cusp of stardom. Everyone who meets him can sense it, in how he carries himself and how people react to him. Right now, he’s in the midst of promotion for his first lead role in a feature, Blue Film. He plays Aaron, a cam-boy who agrees to spend the night with an anonymous client (played by Reed Birney) who, it turns out, has a tie to his past. Moore used his own explorations of shame at the time to tune into what his character might have been feeling, mentioning he’d probably play it differently today, “because I’m always changing.”

He talks about his time with characters the way other people talk about their past selves, each a different version of Kieron. When I point out that he only played Max in The Intimacy Coordinator five months ago, he retorts, "I've done a whole other character since then, and that one was a lot to shed." Like it's obvious, of course, that five months is more than enough time to become someone different. (The other character he’s referring to is a vampire in the upcoming feature film Crave, directed by David Charbonier and Justin Douglas Powell.)

I’ve not failed to notice that Moore often refers to himself in the third person when talking about his career. And I wonder if it’s because to him, his persona still feels like a bit of a performance – when I ask him who he is, he answers almost immediately: “Kieron is an idea.” So I probe a little harder, asking him to elaborate on what that idea might be. 

“I think it's complicated, because I hope I'm more interesting than any of the characters that I will ever play. I just have a hard time believing that,” he shares. “Or maybe it's a safety thing, because in the back of my hand, I have Kieron – so that I'll always have at least one character that I know I'm good at.” He says it all with a tone of self-deprecation that reveals a more insecure version of himself than the tattoos, boxing and bravado would suggest. It’s a version closer to the sensitive kid he says he was. 

Moore is someone who meets his characters halfway. He leans into his differences with them, but he’s aware that he’s becoming who he needs to be in order for the character to work. Like he’s discovering himself through his roles, and therefore embracing the contradictions in himself. It's the not knowing quite who he is, or who he will be in six months’ time, that makes him a great performer. Which is what I tell him, that I believe what he’s doing with his characters is remarkable. He looks down, despondent before almost whispering, “That is very kind. Thank you.” 

Later, as we’re closing the shoot for the day, he puts his leather jacket back on and, sticking out of the pocket, is his infamous accessory. This book is Jon Fosse’s Septology, an 832-page doorstopper that Moore says is one of the most difficult he’s ever read. Someone gasps and says, “I love the book-in-the-jacket look!” Moore laughs and raises his hand to give me a high-five. “We were just talking about this,” he says, with no further explanation. 

Because, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter why he’s reading it or where he’s carrying it. It doesn’t matter if it’s one more performance or meant to be for himself. He’s not bothered by what people think as long as he knows. But those lines blur with Moore anyway – he has always put on performances, which is what, presumably, makes him enjoy the act of acting, of character building. He loves a performance, he always has. And you know what? At least he’s doing it.