Next big step: Brett Sewell was always convinced he would be a star. Pic: Gabriel MacArthur
With half-a-million followers on TikTok, a former pupil at Selhurst’s world-famous performing arts school is preparing for a career-defining move. And Brett Sewell tells GABRIEL MacARTHUR there’s no ‘Plan B’
BRIT product: winning a place at the BRIT School changed Brett Sewell’s life
There is something cinematic about the image Brett Sewell paints of the morning that changed his life. A 14-year-old, shivering, giraffe-print onesie-wearing Brett Sewell. perched on his patio wall in the half-dark, waiting for the arrival of the postman. He had been up since before 5am. He had given the postman one instruction: a light envelope meant bad news, a heavy one meant everything.
The envelope was heavy.
That fateful envelope contained the news that Brett Sewell had been accepted to the BRIT School in Croydon.
His life would never be the same.
“From the first moment, at the open day, I knew I had to be there,” he tells me, almost two decades later, settled into a chair at The Manor LDN dance studio in Finsbury Park, his eyes drifting occasionally as his mind reaches back through time. “I owe everything to the BRIT School. It moulded me into who I am today.”
Today, Brett Sewell is one of the most in-demand commercial dancers in the country. He has toured the world’s biggest stages, performing with artists at the pinnacle of fame including Dua Lipa, Harry Styles, Lana Del Rey, Kelly Rowland, Eve, and Busta Rhymes, and spent time with Janet Jackson. Now, for his next step, he is preparing to move from Croydon to Los Angeles on an “extraordinary talent” visa, what some call a “Genius Visa”.
TikTok ticking: Sewell has hundreds of thousands of followers globally
“Coming from Croydon, I was born there, raised there — to be able to tell a story in a place that really doesn’t have stories like this, in this world, I think it’s quite interesting.”
That certainty was seeded early. His Nan, who he speaks of with tenderness, told him from childhood that he would always be a star. His Mum, a single parent who at one point was working as many as three jobs, would drop him at school, do a day shift, collect him, then do a night shift at the local pub. She never once let the financial strain show, “I never went without,” Sewell says.
“When someone works that hard for you, how she got me where I wanted to be, you can only work hard in return.”
Sewell regularly returns to Selhurst to teach the next generation of BRIT School aspiring artists. He teaches them technique but also what it takes to make it when you have no connections in an industry full of nepotism. “If you’re not a hustler, you may as well not do it,” he says bluntly. “You have to be at the right classes, speaking to the right agents, okay with being vulnerable with the right people, okay with not being the best in the room to become the best in the room.”
Always a star: Brett Sewell on stage performing with Dua Lipa
He draws a distinction that he returns to often: the difference between a good dancer and a working dancer. “If you can’t harness that skill of being able to shift and shape-shift, you have to go and learn how to do that.” He teaches his students “never to compromise their soul or their spirit but to know when and how to mould”.
He says: “A lot of people don’t have someone coming back to tell them everything is possible. I would like to say I am an inspiration to them.” His self-assurance back on full display.
Sewell isn’t simply an inspiration to his students in Croydon, but also through his building of a remarkable platform online. Half a million people follow him on TikTok, watching his dance videos, attempting his challenges, tagging him from living rooms and playgrounds across the world. He shook his head, almost in disbelief: “The numbers still take some reckoning with”.
Sewell says: “There was a young kid in Brazil who messaged me he was about 12. He said: ‘You look like me. You’re a professional dancer and I love doing your challenges’. I’m in Brazil, however many miles away. That’s crazy.” He looked away from me, towards the pink lights of the studio. “Seeing such a wide demographic of people who aren’t even dancers, who just want to share the love of dance, that’s beautiful.”
Styles guru: Harry Styles is just one of the headline acts where Breet Sewell’s dancing has been an essential
His move to the United States comes in a complicated moment. As a mixed-race man preparing to move to Trump’s America in the middle of a war and profound political instability, I ask him whether he is apprehensive.
“Everything going on in the world is scary politically,” he says. “But I try and keep it in a bank. I’m aware of the things I can do within my control but it’s a beast you can’t fight.
“When you’re chasing a dream, you just have to run with it.”
When I ask Sewell whether there was ever a time he doubted himself, whether there was ever a Plan B, he cuts me off before I finish the sentence. “No,” he says.
“I don’t believe in Plan Bs.”
Sewell’s certainty was constructed over the course of many years and many set-backs, including a career-threatening knee injury. “Plan A can take twists and turns, it can go left, it can go right, it can be slower or faster, but there is no Plan B.”
Youthful promise: young Breet Sewell jumped for joy when he got a place at the BRIT School
There is a difference, you start to realise, between self-assurance and self-protection. Sewell’s confidence is not the effortless kind – the kind that has never been tested. It is the kind that has been tested constantly, and has chosen, every single time, not to break.
To spend an hour with Brett Sewell is to be in the company of someone who has always, on some fundamental level, known exactly who he is. Not in a way that forecloses curiosity or growth but, quite the opposite, in the way that certain people seem to move through the world, impossible to knock off course.
He told his Mum once, when he was small, that he was meant to be a star. He says it again now, not as a boast but as a statement of fact, the kind of thing you say when you have simply, always, known it to be true.
“I always say to my Mum, I meant to be a star, and then I’m a star. I used to say that when I was younger, I’m a star. I just always knew.”
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