Whitney Peak wears Chanel Spring-Summer 2025 Haute Couture collection throughout.
Whitney Peak is having a moment.
It’s a cold but sunny New York Sunday in February, and we are in Brooklyn at Industria, a massive studio complex nestled under the Williamsburg Bridge. Next to booths set up for hair and makeup is a line of clothing racks hung with the latest couture collection from Chanel, each piece more intricate in its detailing than the next. Safely over on the other side of the room, the snack table is loaded with all the coffee, sugar, and carbs needed to fuel the dozen or so people working hard on this day-long high-fashion shoot.
Peak is standing in front of a bubblegum-pink backdrop having her hair touched up as someone hits the play button. “Who’s the cute guy with the white jacket,” she lip syncs, throwing a few moves as her BFF Sabrina Carpenter’s “Bed Chem” fills the space. Her already spectacular afro is teased out another inch, the wind machine switch is hit, and just like that, Whitney Peak, young woman living her best life, becomes Whitney Peak, professional actress and model.
She may only be 22, but Peak has been steadily making an impression since she scored a small part playing opposite Idris Elba in Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game in 2017. Recurring spots in the television dramas Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Home Before Dark followed. But the game-changing year for Peak was 2020: first she was offered a lead part on the reboot of Gossip Girl, and then came the call from the House of Chanel. She was still only 17.
“When that call first came in, I didn’t really know what it meant,” Peak recalls as she settles across from me on a couch next to the snack table. “To be so completely honest, I had zero expectations of anything happening at all.”
Fast forward a few years, and here we are: Peak is a Chanel ambassador (she caused a stir at the Met Gala in May wearing a custom outfit from the maison) with a slew of movies in production. And a month or so after we met, her biggest role yet was announced. She will play Lenore Dove Baird in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping—the next instalment of the franchise that propelled Jennifer Lawrence to stardom.
But today she snuggles into an oversized black leather jacket, smiling broadly when I tell her I like it (it was made by a friend). It’s hardly a surprise that she is pretty and petite, but Peak has a charisma—that special something that is born not learned—that gives her a real presence. She speaks softly but deliberately, pausing often to consider her response to my questions, her face serious and thoughtful. And when she relaxes and smiles, that same face transforms, lit up from within. It’s no wonder Chanel was smitten.
The youngest of four children (there are eight years between her and her brother, the next youngest), Peak was born in Uganda. She attended Hillside Primary School Naalya, a boarding school in Kampala—the only one of her siblings to be educated privately—and showed her ability to focus and fight early on, swimming competitively before she hit double digits. The family—her mother, brother, two sisters, and Canadian stepfather—moved to Vancouver in 2012, when Peak was nine, initially cramming into a downtown apartment.
“I think we lived on Seymour Street,” she says. “There were five of us in a tiny apartment—it was insane, but I loved it. I felt like I was in a movie.” Left to her own devices while the rest of the family dealt with all the complexities of settling in a new country, Peak watched television and plotted her next power move.
“I really got into dancing,” she tells me. “There was a gym in the building, and I would go there because I wanted to be flexible. I would force myself because I wanted to be able to do the splits. I started doing acrobatics because I was fascinated by it,” she adds. “I couldn’t believe people could do that with their bodies—and that’s when swimming went out the window.”
She believed if she could reach a decent standard on her own, her stepfather would be persuaded to let her take dance lessons. Having succeeded, so began her competitive dance phase. “It’s not something a lot of people know about me,” she notes.
After a couple of years finding their feet in Vancouver, the family moved to Port Coquitlam and began building their new lives. It wasn’t always easy. “Definitely a culture shock,” Peak says, nodding.
“I always knew I was light skinned—my siblings are my half-siblings, and they are dark skinned—and then I came to Vancouver and I was just shocked. Growing up in Uganda, I saw a lot of white people, but I never felt like a minority—I thought this is what it’s like everywhere. And then I moved to Vancouver, and I was like, ‘oh.’
“It was definitely harder on my siblings,” she continues. “For them it was like day and night. It was a very rough experience for my family. When we moved to Vancouver, my mother had to relearn a lot of things—the only things that she really got to bring with her were her religion and her culture. English is her third language, and she was adjusting to western culture, and it was a big shift for her. For us, too, but for her, she had to give up so much for us to get the opportunities we have now.”
“My family has always been quite theatrical just in our being. We all love to dance and sing, and we are very loud when we are together.”
The focus in those early years was clear: “Very much about setting down roots, needing to find jobs, focus on school, figure out what you’re going to do. We weren’t really living much.”
Any career aspirations followed established ideas around success. “None of us had ever thought about the arts. Ever,” Peak says emphatically. “It was always somebody was going to be a doctor. Somebody was going to be a lawyer. Somebody was going to work in communications.” The plan half worked: her eldest sister is in communications; her other sister, in medicine. Peak and her musician brother are the outliers.
“My family has always been quite theatrical just in our being,” Peak notes. “We all love to dance and sing, and we are very loud when we are together, and it’s very animated. We physicalize all of our happiness and joy.”
Acting hadn’t crossed her mind until she heard an ad on the radio purportedly for Disney auditions and responded on a whim. But her career was almost over before it began: Peak and her mother found they had been scammed. Nevertheless, despite the “agency” they had paid not being as advertised, Peak was still registered with a Vancouver company that supplies background actors to the many productions shot in and around the city.
She started working on sets “as a hobby” and eventually hooked a small role on the television series Minority Report. Her screen dad, Colin Lawrence, was impressed enough to refer her to his agent, the role in Molly’s Game followed, and seeing that a future in acting started to look like a real possibility, Peak—still only 14—enrolled in formal classes.
“That was my introduction to character study and acting as a means of understanding people and relationships,” she explains. “It was very fascinating to me. Because it wasn’t just about pretending anymore.”
The small recurring roles in television shows shot in B.C. followed until Peak auditioned for Gossip Girl 2.0. On returning from an extended trip to Uganda for her sister’s wedding in early 2020, the call came in offering her the part of Zoya Lott. The plan was to take her schooling online and move to New York to start filming. But no sooner was everything in place, her big adventure was put on hold due to the pandemic.
“I was static for seven months,” she says with a shrug of resignation.
Despite its delayed start, Gossip Girl proved to Peak that this was the career for her.
“When I moved to New York, it was the first time I felt that I could live for myself and try different things.”
“After season one ended, I was on set and I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t want to go back home and get a job.’ I just felt I can’t not be here,” she explains. “It was a difficult conversation to have with my mom, because I had said I’m going to go and do this for a year, and then I’ll come back. But I couldn’t stop. It was something that was so important to me.”
There was also New York.
“When I moved to New York, it was the first time I felt that I could live for myself and try different things,” she explains. Having family and friends visiting from home kept her grounded and able to cope when her new life became overwhelming. “Just being with people who really know you and actually see you and have seen you in every phase of your life.
“For me I feel that New York is home more than any other place,” she adds. “But I also am a firm believer that it’s about the people you have around you. I have really good community here.”
One of the first people she met was Sabrina Carpenter. “That’s my girl,” she quips, face lit up with light and love. They were introduced by a mutual friend when the two up-and-coming stars were fresh faces in the city.
“Me and my best friend Paloma [Sandoval] were living here together at the time, and so the three of us just got really close and spent a lot of time together,” Peak recalls. “And then a couple of years later, Sabrina said, ‘Do you want to be in a music video, and this is the pitch, and it’s going to be absolutely nonsense, and just come shoot this for two days.’
“And I was ‘Oh, absolutely!’ There was no question about it.”
The 2022 video (for Carpenter’s hit “Nonsense”) saw the pop star and her besties Peak and Sandoval hanging out as friends before going to a party where they meet three boys—played by themselves.
“We had a great time. I’m so so sooo proud of her,” Peak adds. “It’s been such a big year for her, and she is so deserving of it because she works so hard and remains so humble.”
Peak’s own big year came in 2023, when she was chosen to be the face of Chanel’s youthful perfume Coco Mademoiselle.
“That was an insane experience for me,” she admits, eyes wide with wonder. “I don’t really understand it, and every so often I forget—I’ve celebrated it, and I feel so honoured to be a part of it—and you have to keep it at arm’s length just for your own sanity so you don’t get too wrapped up in it. And then I get a photo from a friend of mine travelling, someone I really miss, and it’s a photo of me on a bus stop or something, and it all comes rushing back.”
Navigating celebrity at such a young age has never been easy, but with the never-ending scrutiny of social media, I suggest, these days it must require real survival skills.
“As you were asking that question, I was thinking that it’s probably the same for any other young girl,” Peak counters. “Of course, it’s on a much larger scale, and there’s a lot more eyes on you,” she continues, “but I think it’s just about the company that you keep. Just trying to be around people who keep you grounded and make you feel safe and that you don’t have to act around or perform around. You know what I mean?
“Chanel is incredible,” she proffers. “I’ve become close with a lot of the people that work there. They have taught me so much.
“I’m a very emotional person,” she elaborates. “I’ve been to many shoots and done interviews and just started breaking down. It gets very overwhelming, but the way Chanel handled that—they didn’t tell me to put it away. They didn’t tell me to stop crying. They allowed me to feel everything and gave me the space to do so and accepted me for who I was and all my flaws. I’ve grown up so much with them—I’ve worked with them since I was 17. That coming out of my youth is absurd. It’s not lost on me. It is surreal.
“But I feel so lucky because it’s not as scary anymore. It feels natural and I feel safe. I feel very taken care of.”
Read more from our Summer 2025 issue. Hair Stylist: Nai’vasha for The Wall Group. Makeup: Tyron Machhausen for The Wall Group. Styling Assistant: Gemelis Nunez. Digitech: Javier Alvarez. Photographer’s Assistants: Luke Stoychoff and Mark Short. Videographer: Bell Soto.
