He made his name fronting auteur-driven shows—namely Mike White’s The White Lotus and Lena Dunham’s Too Much—but Will Sharpe is a triple threat. He is the writer and director of Prodigies, his new Apple TV+ series, in which he acts alongside Ayo Edebiri as two former child prodigies in their 30s.
What keeps you up at night?
Besides the news, I guess sometimes when you’re working on something, you do find yourself with thoughts about an edit or a shoot swilling about in your head. I once had a stressful dream where I was wandering around an apartment trying to find an edit point. It played like this long single take and I desperately wanted it to cut, but it just wouldn’t. And then I had another version of the same dream where I was swimming around underwater trying to cut to the surface.
What do you want to see more of in your industry? Less of?
I went to watch the new Pixar film Hoppers with my kids recently, and was surprised at how affected I was simply by the fact that there was a Japanese American family at the heart of it… like you’d never see tamagoyaki in a Pixar film when I was growing up. Representation is obviously really important and some progress has been made, but I do feel like there is still a deeply rooted unconscious bias, which won’t really shift without the necessary depth in diversity, right from the bottom rung of the ladder all the way to the top, both in front of and behind the camera. And even if you make the step of writing a character from a certain background or of casting an actor of a certain ethnicity, I don’t think it counts for much unless you give that character agency over their own story and point of view.
What’s something people get wrong about you?
Some people who first saw me in The White Lotus aren’t aware that I’ve written and directed a fair bit. Also, sometimes I maybe project quite a serious vibe, which is mainly just social anxiety, but if you get past all my stupid defenses I’m actually quite silly.
What do you think is your biggest contribution to culture?
Maybe Flowers? It was my first proper grown up commission, a tiny show on Channel 4 in the U.K., but it’s probably the thing that I get told most often was a reference for something or an influence. It was also a comedy about mental illness at a time when that wasn’t really a thing. To be honest, the conversations around mental health in general I remember being very different back then. I had to fight quite hard to protect its tone and not to be overly simplistic about how we handled certain issues.
Name an influence of yours that might surprise people.
Maybe the broader end of it like Mr. Bean or ’90s Japanese sketch comedy? When you’re writing something I guess you’re consciously trying not to draw too heavily on anything. You want to create something that feels new. But when I look back at the stuff I watched that really stuck with me, I think it’s the fact that it’s all quite different. Maybe that’s interesting. The wide-eyed slapstick of Charlie Chaplin, big broad stupid comedies, Hal Ashby’s films, the epic poems and ancient Greek plays I read at university, the melancholy worlds and funny poetry of Beckett, Hirokazu Koreeda, Leos Carax, the Japanese film The Taste of Tea. I guess a lot of it is stuff that contains comedy but also feelings and isn’t worried about mixing the two together.
What question do you ask yourself most often while you’re making work?
Does it feel right? That’s sort of what it boils down to maybe. There’s other versions of the same question like, “does this feel authentic to what you’re making?” or “does this feel too much like something else?” But ultimately I think you’re just trying to build a language and a world. You pass ideas back and forth with your heads of department and, over time, you all come to know instinctively what’s right and what’s wrong.
Where do you feel most at home?
I lived in Tokyo till I was 8 and then moved to England. So I don’t really feel like I especially belong anywhere. I feel Japanese over here and like a “gaijin” over there. But I guess it’s whenever I’m with family I feel most grounded. Even if we’re filming abroad or somewhere random, we’re quite good at hunkering down and carving out a cosy routine.
When’s the last time you laughed hysterically?
In the edit maybe, messing around trying different things on Prodigies. My kids make me laugh a lot. I love how innocently they’re experiencing the world, like a while back we had to get up early to catch a plane and my son was like, “Where’s the outside gone?” It was dark outside and we realised that he was always asleep before it got dark so he thought the whole outside world had just sort of vanished. Also we were on holiday with some friends recently and they were making fun of how hilarious I was finding this clip of a director auditioning an A.I. actor. I find robots funny.
To read more from the 2026 CULT100 honorees, see the full list here.
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