“Yes...!?”
The shout is loud and hopeful; a short, sharp bark that cuts through the pub’s Wednesday night burble and causes at least one person on a neighbouring table to clutch their chest in a pantomime coronary. On the misaligned projector showing this evening’s match, the free-kick that had swirled into the area and onto Kai Havertz’s head is nodded harmlessly into Manuel Neuer’s arms, and Ian Wright lowers himself back into his seat. “This is good possession away from home,” he says, collecting himself. “We just need to take the chance.”
It’s feasible that someone in here could not know that it is him: a universe where a culturally oblivious drinker might think that this is merely another excitable fan spilling out his anguish and joy at the altar of a midweek Champions League game. But the vast majority instantly register the gravelly cackle and south London delivery; the statement frames, docker cap and glinting, gold-toothed grin. Watching football – in this case, Arsenal’s ultimately doomed Champions League quarter final at Bayern Munich – alongside Ian Wright is proof, as if there were any doubt, that none of it is an act. That when it comes to emotion, and football, Wright doesn’t really know how to hold back or tuck it in. Once, he was the one haring across the pitch with raised, battle-ram fists, celebrating a slotted, left-foot finish. These days, he’s the grandparent of eight, whooping on Instagram like a Prime-addled 12-year-old after an Arsenal victory; the suited big match pundit, pogoing and shredding his vocal cords in the wake of an early England goal. The feeling is the same.
This kind of partisan tub-thumping should be anathema these days: ready-made ammunition for rival fans in the tribal forever war of football discourse. But the strange thing about Wright is that he is that rare figure who transcends the game’s rigid loyalties and internecine squabbles. People who don’t care about football profess their admiration. Chelsea season-ticket holders sheepishly ask for selfies. The more he is his fiercely loyal, emotionally uncorked self, the more he makes an impassioned case for England and for Arsenal, for young players, and the women’s game, the more people listen.
“[People] can’t hate me any more, because I’m not the guy who they thought I was,” Wright says, with one eye still trained on the game. “Now, they see that I’m a decent bloke who just wanted to win for my team and do the best I could, because of [my] upbringing. Now I’m not a threat to them.”
Wright had chosen the location – a ramshackle west London bar and grill, with an enormous, bamboo-fringed beer garden and a crowd so familiar with his presence that he can watch games in relative peace. It is clearly a place of comfort: a proxy living room where he can yelp at the screen, gulp down Guinness and exchange playful barbs with Bardy, the manager and an old friend.
To watch him here, dispatching every scrap of a plate of grilled sea bass before exhorting Takehiro Tomiyasu to make an overlapping run, is to watch a man totally at ease. And, of course, if there is something that has defined the last few years of Wright’s historically turbulent life and career – a period that has included books, hit podcasts, surprise acting roles and the recent accolade of pundit of the year at the Sports Journalists’ Association awards – then it is peace, a kind of hard-won serenity.
“I’d say the last six years have probably been the most successful years of my retirement,” he says, with an air of pride and slight surprise. He credits his 2020 appearance on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs – an instant-classic, emotionally devastating tour through the personal tumult that underpinned his infamously late entry, at 21, to the world of professional football – as being a particular turning point; a moment of both lasting personal growth and first contact with a completely different part of the public consciousness. “Wherever I go and whatever situation I find myself in, from paupers to kings, people have heard it,” he says, with a smile. “I remember I got a message from Russell Crowe saying it was one of the best [episodes] he’s ever heard.”
Before that, the folkloric, against-the-odds story of Wright’s playing career was, he says, “kind of underground”. A supremely talented young footballer who had been spurned by practically every club in London, Wright spent time in prison, worked as a labourer, and thought that his destiny was a life of Sunday league and what-might-have-been, until a chance scouting led to him being signed by Crystal Palace in 1985. If Wright’s story had been a mixtape dispersed in barbershops, pubs and school playgrounds, Desert Island Discs was his major-label moment. Suddenly, a new audience of Middle Englanders found themselves moved by the contours of his story: the multiple failed schoolboy trials, the mentoring influence of his kindly former primary school teacher Mr Pigden. The outpouring of love even precipitated a publishing deal for a children’s novel. “I think that changed something for me,” he adds. “You’re talking about breaking through to a whole different level of people.”
There was something else as well. Not long after Wright had become a known quantity to Radio 4 listeners and broadsheet readers, a younger generation of predominantly Black early admirers and advocates brought him into the fold to pay homage. Stormzy put him in the video for 2022’s “Mel Made Me Do It”, at the centre of a star-studded tribute to Black British excellence and longevity. Foday Dumbuya, the Sierra Leonean heritage founder of African-inspired label Labrum, got him to swagger down the catwalk for the brand’s spring/summer 2024 show at London Fashion Week. Oscar-winner Daniel Kaluuya and co-director Kibwe Tavares cast him in The Kitchen, a film that explored life, grief and social disparity on a dystopian housing estate in a speculative, near-future London.
Perhaps you could say that he is getting his flowers while he can enjoy them. However you describe it, the recent milestone of his 60th birthday, celebrated last November, seems to have inculcated a broader embrace of Wright’s status as a community elder or Uncle. The GQ shoot he has just returned from is, he says, yet another scarcely believable marker of the shift in his public standing. “Getting [this] recognition is something that is quite hard to take,” he says, a little sombrely, “because I felt that when I deserved to get stuff [when I was playing football], I didn’t get it. And so you try to train yourself to not care.”
If he had to attribute the change to any particular trait, then he would say it is his constancy; his determination to truthfully represent himself and where he comes from, even in the face of societal pressure to do the opposite. “Why I’m getting the love and everything now,” he says, “all the Uncle stuff… it’s because people have actually seen that I’ve stayed true to who I am and who I was.” As Tavares, one of his directors on The Kitchen, puts it: “For me, he’s always represented community, been that person that has stood up for people and used his voice in a way that is positive. He’s someone with authority and power but he’s genuine and he connects with people very easily.”
This period of rebirth is also one of significant transition. In May, Wright stepped down from his role as a pundit on Match of the Day – blowing the whistle on a 27-year association with a programme he first appeared on while he was still playing for Arsenal. The BBC’s long-running, recently embattled football highlights show has totemic importance in Wright’s life; it is, as he nervously blurted to Des Lynam during that first appearance in 1997, his “Graceland”. Wright’s support of Gary Lineker last year – he refused to appear on the show after Lineker was asked to temporarily stand down from presenting duties over his use of social media – inspired similar boycotts from Alan Shearer, Micah Richards and other pundits. This Spartacus moment helped shift support in favour of Lineker and underlined Wright’s status as one of MOTD’s most influential components. So the decision to not renew his contract was a wrenching one.
“It’s time,” he says, setting down his Guinness after another sip. “Match of the Day is so iconic, so it’s a tough one. But, for me, it’s just run its course. I’m done.” A major factor in Wright’s decision to leave a job he has been doing, on and off, for almost three decades is the awkwardness of MOTD’s live Saturday-night broadcast from Salford. On days he is filming, he sets off at 8.30am, finishes at midnight, and arrives back home in London at 3.30am. “It takes me two or three days to get over that,” he says. “I’m 60 now [and] it’s just taken its toll.”
There is, as it will transpire, more to say about this change and the others that Wright can feel in both his career and how he moves through the world; more still to add on his ongoing struggle to fully forgive or understand the demonisation he experienced when he was a player, and the wisdom he tries to pass on to the modern Premier League stars who solicit advice from him. All of that is to come. But for now, as we watch as much of the game as we can (he has to dash off at halftime to record a podcast), he is just another penitent and pleading fan, lost in the glow of the wonkily projected action from the Allianz Arena. Figuratively kicking every ball. And still just as obsessed with a game that has given him agony and ecstasy but has always, unquestionably, been his solace and cocoon against a chaotic world.
“Ian Wright-Wright-WRIGHT!”
His image and bellowed name is most readily associated with a handful of imposing, old-fashioned London stadiums. It was lead vocal to the rhythmic thwack of hoardings during his six years at Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park. It was the full-throated roar heard on a steady loop for the best part of seven record-breaking years playing for Arsenal at Highbury. It even temporarily became part of West Ham’s repertoire during a single, late-career season at Upton Park.
But if you want to know the ground where Ian Wright first fell for the drama, danger and squashed-in collectivism of the terraces, then you need to go back to The Old Den, Millwall’s notoriously forbidding former stronghold on a south-east London back street. Famed for its ferocious, intimidatory home support, dank, malodorous approach tunnels and spiked gulag fencing, it was, in its ’70s and ’80s pomp, the kind of place a traumatised away fan might tearfully describe to a medical professional. To an 11-year-old Wright, however, sneaking in to experience the noise and wildness of a packed stand was an intoxicant.
“It was tribal,” he says. “Probably like joining a gang, [although] it wasn’t any badness; we wasn’t fighting or anything. We was just tagging along. But when I was in there, I was one of the lads and I felt like I was part of something.” Yes, he overheard racism – of the confusing, “not you, you’re all right” variety – but it was, in his memory, always overridden by an unexpected protectiveness and brutish compassion. These were the pre-Hillsborough days, before the government-mandated transition to all-seater elite stadiums, when Cold Blow Lane would be so full it was one swaying, writhing mass, and the only way to see the pitch was to stand on a precarious metal railing with someone gripping your legs to keep you upright.
“If you were too far down the front,” he remembers, “then these so-called racists, who shouldn’t care, they’d get you and move you from there because it was dangerous and you could be squashed.” It’s an observation that speaks to Wright’s appreciation for human complexity and the good and bad of the environment that created him. But when he eventually became a professional player, and encountered the spitting fury and unrepeatable insults of rival fans at grounds like The Old Den, it was those old Cold Blow Lane days that he kept in mind. “My experience at Millwall kind of made me impervious to anything [fans] can do,” he says. “Because everybody was scared of Millwall and what they were about. But these were people that I came from.” He laughs; there is the flash of gold. “I almost felt I’d been raised by wolves. Like I was Mowgli – because I wasn’t afraid of them.”
If you know anything about Wright’s childhood then it is perhaps not that surprising that he was enthralled by a sense of belonging. Born in Woolwich (Arsenal’s original home) and raised in nearby Brockley, he was the youngest of three, hard-charging and excitable but so emotional he would cry inconsolably whenever he lost a match. The environment at home was, in his words, “explosive”. His mother was a troubled, proverb-spouting heavy-drinker; his birth father a mostly absent, peripheral figure; his stepdad, a womanising, weed-smoking bully who was known to punish Wright and his older brother Maurice by forcing them to face the wall when Match of the Day, their favourite show, was on.
There’s every chance you will have already heard some of these tales. Wright has relayed the significant beats of his story so frequently – via Desert Island Discs, his documentary Home Truths and a viral Players’ Tribune essay published in late 2018 – that they are almost like recounted scenes in a movie. There are the failed academy trials with clubs including Charlton, Brighton and Leyton Orient; the 14-day stint in Chelmsford prison for non-payment of fines and driving without a licence; the decision, with his adopted toddler-age son Shaun at home and another, Bradley, on the way, to shelve his footballing ambitions in favour of a steady job at a Greenwich sugar refinery. Then, of course, there are the moments that made him the patron saint of Sunday-league dreamers: his scouting, successful trial and initial three-month contract at Crystal Palace in 1985. And the 1990 FA Cup final where he came off the bench, barely recovered from a broken leg, to score two goals.
What perhaps gets missed in this neat Hollywood arc is the lasting impact of all those years of rejection. Wright had continually been told that he wasn’t good enough, by the clubs that turned him down and, also, by the people in his neighbourhood, who flashed I-told-you-so smiles when word got around that he hadn’t quite made it again. The positive side of this lingering sense of inadequacy was the effect it had on how he played and prepared. At Palace, Wright would bemuse his new teammates and coaches by staying behind to curl the ball into the top corner with just his left foot; he would petition academy players to whip in crosses so he could work on his heading. “Because of coming in so late, I was in a hurry to try and be successful,” he says. “I was working on myself every day.”
To watch Wright at his peak back then – the low, stalking gait, the leaps that strain every neck muscle, the lunging blocks as a mulleted centre-half tries to hoof it upfield – is to be reminded of someone that would not be denied. The finishes are varied (drilled left-footers, opportunistic back stick headers, delicate, feathered dinks over stranded keepers) but there is always pitiless accuracy and focus, often followed by the tension-break of exuberant dancing and a gold-toothed grin. He was both contract killer and clown, a contrast that had a particular resonance for those who looked on and saw themselves in his second-chance story and mix of gifted impudence and unbridled passion.
“He was someone who was immensely talented but overlooked,” says the writer Musa Okwonga, Wright’s friend, recurring guest on the Wrighty’s House podcast and co-author of his children’s book, Striking Out. “And then, one day, someone puts a microphone under their nose and [finds] they can sing like Pavarotti.” This feeling of recognition was especially potent for Black fans starved of positive forms of authentic, mainstream representation. “If you look at how Black players are [often] portrayed, he was one of the first in public life to fully own it,” adds Okwonga. “He was not apologetic. It was: ‘This is who I am. I’m passionate, I’m good at this, and I’m going to be myself.’”
The flip side of this unapologetic assuredness was that it occasionally spilled over into the sort of disciplinary issues that coloured Wright’s public perception. Today, he is nothing short of a national treasure, an emotionally intelligent force for good with the bespectacled bearing of a Turner Prize-winning sculptor. So it is a genuine surprise to look back at 1990s press clippings that characterise him as dangerously volatile, a combustive “firework” of a forward whose aggression, critics argued, was a barrier to his international prospects.
This is not to say that his emotions weren’t ever an issue – his rageful trashing of a referee’s dressing room in 1999, following a sending-off in a West Ham game, led to a three-match ban, a £17,500 fine, and the anger management support he undoubtedly needed. But it’s clear, throughout our conversation, that this media characterisation still haunts him.
“They continually wanted to have me as the angry Black man,” he says. “No matter what I did, no matter what I achieved and no matter how good the goal was, they would always find a negative to not give me that credit.” In his view, this perception of him had real-world implications for his career. He was never named Football Writers’ Association footballer of the year and wasn’t selected for England’s Euro 1992 squad, despite having just won the golden boot during his first season at Arsenal. “You know in Goodfellas where Tommy thinks he’s getting made and instead he gets killed?” he says, with a rueful smile, remembering the moment he went into then-manager Graham Taylor’s office. “It was just like that.”
This feeling of being repeatedly passed over hardened him; instilled an attitude of, “Well, fuck you, then” that, in turn, created a vicious circle of animosity between him and, yes, England’s punditry class, but also disapproving members of the Black community. “Remember: there were Black people saying, ‘Why don’t you stop angering people? Why don’t you stop acting like some street man and embarrassing the community?’” he notes. “So I had it from both sides.” He of course went on to achieve many things in his career – 33 England caps, an FA Cup and league double in 1998, the breaking of Cliff Bastin’s 178-goal scoring record at Arsenal, as memorialised by the euphoric reveal of that ‘Just Done It’ vest – but there is a sense the frustration of being so consistently misunderstood and misrepresented, from all angles, inevitably clouded things for him. “I couldn’t enjoy my great moments because of it,” he admits.
This is what makes the current wave of love and Uncle-level deference all the more meaningful. “I’m at the stage now where a whole generation, whether it’s Stormzy, Daniel [Kaluuya] or Kano, looks at me and says, ‘Yeah, I recognise something in him,’” he says. “I just continued to go along the line of me, bro. And so I’m so pleased.” For so long it felt like he was toiling alone. All he wanted was the unequivocal recognition he sought at those junior trials; the protection and acceptance he found in the crush of the crowd at The Old Den and the full-throated adoration of the Clock End. And now he finally had it, he decided to do what he hadn’t always done throughout his gloriously single-minded, shoot-on-sight playing career: get his head up, and try to assist others.
Before he was a primary school teacher, Sydney Pigden was a Second World War pilot. Later, he gained unexpected global fame thanks to a much-shared clip of a documentary reunion between him and Ian Wright (“Mr Pigden? You’re alive?”). Now, almost seven years after his death at the ripe old age of 95, Mr Pigden lives on in the unlikely form of Sydney the cat: a mottled black and white ball of inquisitive mischief who, alongside another cat called Nova, has been a beloved member of the Wright household since he first came yowling into their lives eight months ago.
“I honestly just love spending time with them,” explains Wright, with a touch of giddiness. “I’m fascinated by them. They’re unbelievable to watch.” He had always resisted the pleas for kittens from his youngest children – Roxanne and Lola, two daughters with his second wife, Nancy Hallam – because he was allergic. After years of persistent lobbying, however, he finally acquiesced and got himself a little blue inhaler to ameliorate any itchy-throated flare-ups. As his copious doting cat-dad videos on TikTok attest, Wright has been slightly taken aback by the positive impact Sydney and Nova have had on his wellbeing. “People say they alleviate stress, and I totally get it,” he says. “Sometimes [I’ll be] in the house watching television and both of them will come and sit next to me, or on me, and just stay there. And I think, ‘I don’t want to move.’ Because the energy that they’re giving out just makes you feel amazing.” And so, in a strange way, Sydney Pigden’s spirit endures.
It is a couple of days after our first meeting at the pub, a blossom-strewn spring morning, and I’ve been summoned to Wright’s north-west London home to join him on the drive down to Kent, where he’s shooting a video for a brand partnership. Arsenal went on to lose the Bayern game the other evening. There will be no unexpected Champions League triumph this year. But from the moment Wright first bounded out of his house, fragrant and sharp in an olive workwear blazer and artfully scuffed Red Wing boots, he is a man ready to find the philosophical positives in defeat.
“Obviously, it’s a massive disappointment,” he says, from the upholstered throne of his Mercedes-Benz GLS’s driver’s seat, Emirates Stadium parking badge wedged in the side pocket. “[But] I’m so proud of this team and what they and Mikel [Arteta] have done in two years. It’s still a work in progress and yet we’re still challenging at the very highest level.” He taps the relevant address into his phone and swings the car out onto the road. “We, as a fanbase, have got to just calm down and let this man work.”
This kind of rational, big-picture thinking – a counterpoint to the exaggerated talk of “bottlers” that dominates football media in an era defined by clippable virality – is a hallmark of Wright’s punditry. Yes, he celebrates with the fervour of a season ticket-holding diehard, but his analysis of the game is always notable for its empathy and thoughtfulness.
“Pundits that sometimes chew players out are not always that well regarded,” says Okwonga. “Ian doesn’t do that. He’s not afraid to be critical, but players look at it as coming from a place of care. I don’t think it’s betraying his confidence to say that a lot of current players seek him out for advice. And I think one of the reasons he is so beloved is that he observes a duty of care to footballers unlike almost any other pundit I’ve seen.”
What does Wright tell the players that do enlist him as their consigliere? “What I always say to Marcus [Rashford], Raheem [Sterling], Kalvin Phillips or whoever it is, is this: ‘Listen, bro, this is a journey,’” he says. “It’s tough and I’m not going to sit here and say I’d be able to deal with being a footballer in a world where there’s social media and everyone can come for you. But you’re still doing one of the best things in life: playing professional football at the highest level. Nothing should ever stop you from feeling like you are the guy [because] you’ve worked hard to get where you are. All this noise, that’s all it is.”
He acknowledges that there is a particular level of toxicity, insinuation and scrutiny that Black players face; a palpable pressure that makes him almost nervous when the likes of Rashford, Sterling and Saka are on the pitch. “You’re praying that they just play well, just have a good touch,” he adds. But it is, he thinks, an issue of class as much as race. “It’s not just a Black thing, it’s a working-class thing,” he says. “There’s certain people in society who are not happy about working-class lads, whether they’re Black or white, progressing.”
Wright gets to be a fan these days, but his instinct is still to put himself in a player’s position. Today, in the midst of an especially acrimonious week among Arsenal supporters, he is thinking about the level of criticism Bukayo Saka has been receiving. “People are talking about him in a way that’s like, ‘It’s done for him, he’s this, he’s that, he’s not world class.’ It’s crazy and it’s ludicrous what we’re expecting these guys to have to deal with. [That’s why] you bring [current players] back to the core of why they’re playing and take them to a place when they were younger and they done it for love. Because that supersedes everything.”
This sensitivity – allied with an ability to speak up for those from similar social backgrounds – gets to the heart of Wright’s particular appeal. His belated entry to football gave him both grit and gratitude; the memories of working as a labourer, shifting ballast or helping scaffolders at 6am, were what made those extra training sessions at Palace a blessing rather than a chore. His turbulent younger life helped make him such a passionate and vocal advocate for the women’s game.
“I love the women’s game simply because it’s another form of football,” he says. “But there’s also been an injustice – because for 50 years they weren’t allowed to play.” He raises his voice, as impassioned as I’ve seen him. “The saddest thing is knowing there’s generations of women who could have played. Imagine if I was born a woman?” There is a pause for emphasis. “I’d have been fucked.”
Not many people get to live the alternate realities of a sliding doors moment, but Wright has. He is both the labourer in the pub telling you he once had trials, and the pro who scored a hat-trick on his league debut for the team he had always dreamed of playing for; the 1990s tabloid pariah with the “hair-trigger temper” and the redeemed national treasure and OBE. His gift is that he remembers all of it. His curse is, well, that he can’t forget any of it.
If Ian Wright had had his way on the set of The Kitchen, he would have worn the wig. Asked to play the role of Lord Kitchener, a pirate radio DJ operating from within the film’s titular housing estate, Wright had wanted to disappear into the role; to obscure his famous face with an anonymising character detail or two. But co-director Tavares took one look at Wright in a proposed Afro hairpiece and, respectfully, told him it was all wrong.
“They wanted people to see it was me,” explains Wright now. In the film, Lord Kitchener (named after the Trinidadian calypso singer and Empire Windrush passenger) is the film’s conscience, a bringer of vibes and dispenser of jokes. So, yes, the whole point was that people recognised him – because these are the values he has long embodied. “In different ways, and to different people,” notes Tavares, “he’s always been a pillar of the community.”
Naturally, after Wright’s eventual, strikingly empathetic performance in the film, talk has turned to whether his post-Match of the Day career would involve a pivot to acting. Or maybe, as hinted by his recent appearance on Monday Night Football, next season will see him unveiled as a new signing for Sky Sports.
Both theories are, it would seem, wide of the mark. Wright is not planning to get acting lessons or plotting a Vinnie Jones-style third act. (Although if the right project came along, he’d “think about it”.) And the speculation about him permanently joining another punditry team misses the point about why he is stepping away from one of his dream jobs, working alongside Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker (whose squad numbers are immortalised in the “8, 9, 10” tattoo on his left hand).
“You might see me pop up on MNF but I’m not leaving to go to Sky,” he says. “I’ve got something to offer but, at the same time, it’s got to be on my own terms.” This applies to professional output – his Wrighty’s House podcasts and live shows, plus his key role as part of Gary Neville’s YouTube megahit, Stick To Football – that is both more logistically nimble and reflective of football’s now diffuse digital media landscape.
This shift in his work obligations is also about clearing space for things that weren’t always possible when he was younger. The most painful memories from his youth – waiting for eight hours for his dad to come and buy him some trousers for a trip to the seaside; sitting impotently at Brighton’s training ground as a trialist, because he needed expenses for the train home – tend to involve a degree of isolated helplessness. Now he can drive his daughter to netball, and he can stand on the sidelines, clapping alongside all the other rain-drenched parents when the other plays football. “It was always my wife standing there [on the touchline],” he says. “And so I just [thought] to myself, Yeah, I need to stand there.”
After a 90-minute drive, we crunch up the gravel driveway of an enormous home just outside Rainham. Today’s shoot is a blending of the personal and professional: Wright is filming some content for Marks & Spencer alongside his granddaughter, Raphaella Wright-Phillips – Shaun’s 10-year-old daughter, Arsenal youth prospect and skilful star of multiple videos on Wright’s Instagram.
Inside, the crew scurry and chatter. Cameras are trained on a dining table, and there is the low scent of woodsmoke drifting over from the fireplace. Raphaella says a bright, confident hello. Wright sits and picks at a croissant; his manager wordlessly takes his square-framed glasses and cleans them with a lens cloth.
“Raphy,” says Wright, looking at his granddaughter. “So what happened with your game? How did you play?”
There is a half-joking suggestion from a member of the crew that they save the conversation for when the camera is rolling – to “hold the gold”, as TV producers sometimes say.
“No, I don’t want to talk about this on camera,” says Wright, calm, but firm. “I just heard she had a tough game, so I’m asking her about it.” I am reminded of something Okwonga told me about Wright: “He never makes you feel like you are less than him,” he said. “I’ve never met someone in that world so keen to make space for others.”
Wright always used to play like he was in a hurry. Now, he wants to take his time, spend it shrewdly, and savour the gifts he had been repeatedly told would never be his. So they take the moment, while the cameras are off.
See Ian Wright at GQ Heroes in Oxfordshire, from 3-5 July, in association with BMW UK. For more information and tickets, visit GQHeroes.com.
Styling by Itunu Oke
Barbering by Nick Barford
Makeup by Marina Belfon-Rose
Nails by Kim Truong
Set design by Joshua Stovell
Movement direction by Jonny Vieco
Tailoring by Frankie Farmer