Keiynan Lonsdale

Keiynan Lonsdale is an Australian actor, dancer, and singer-songwriter.

Lonsdale was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1991 to an immigrant Nigerian father and a native-born Australian mother of European descent. Between his two parents, Keiynan has 11 siblings.

Lonsdale got his start in the performing arts at the age of 16 as a dancer in the Australian film Razzle Dazzle: A Journey into Dance (2007). From there, he landed other domestic acting roles on shows such as All Saints (1998–2009) and Dance Academy (2010–2013), and also worked for two years as an MTV video jockey.

As Keiynan’s career branched out, he began appearing on US screens, with roles in films and shows such as The Divergent Series: Insurgent (2015), The Finest Hours (2016), Love, Simon (2018), Step Up: High Water (2018–2022), and Eden (2021). Lonsdale also played the DC Comics hero Wally West/Kid Flash in the CW series The Flash (2014–2023) and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (2016–2022), with an appearance in Supergirl (2015–2021) as well. To date, he has appeared in more than 20 movies and shows, and has also appeared as himself on nearly 20 shows and live events.

Lonsdale won the 2018 MTV Movie + TV Award for Best Kiss from Love, Simon, for a same-sex kiss he shared with actor Nick Robinson. In 2018, he won the Youth Advocacy Award at the Center Dinner in NYC and GQ’s Actor of the Year Award that same year.^[1]

Lonsdale’s music is a blend of pop, R&B, and electronic influences. His debut studio album, Rainbow Boy, was released in 2020. He has also released two extended plays, and 14 singles. He performed three songs from his album for Billboard’s Livestream in 2020.

In 2017, Keiynan came out as bi on Instagram, saying, “I like girls, & I like guys.”

He has intermittently identified as bisexual, gay, and queer. In 2018, he told Billboard, “Now it just depends on the day. Sometimes I’m bisexual, sometimes I’m gay, sometimes I feel straight, sometimes I’m not anything … It doesn’t matter. Either way, throughout all of that, I’m Keiynan.”

He went on to tell them.us in 2020, “I didn’t fully accept my queerness until I was in my 20s, when I got my first therapist … She helped me come to terms with it. … Two months after that, I was having a party at my house, and I found my two friends that knew about my sexuality and just randomly said, ‘I’m going to tell everyone right now. I don’t know why. I just want to.’ So I came out to the party. I just told them, ‘Yeah, all those rumors are true.'”