Brennan Clost on “The Next Step”, Canadian Cinema, & Queer Characters
If you haven’t heard of Brennan Clost, you’re about to. The Burlington, Ontario-born actor and dancer is in the midst of multiple releases: Netflix’s Fear Street: Prom Queen launched last month, while The Legacy of Cloudy Falls impressed at the Canadian Film Festival in March. Plus, there’s more to come, including the release of Loathe Thy Neighbor — an indie film that marked Clost’s first time as producer — as well as an appearance in the final season of beloved dance series The Next Step, where he’ll reprise the role that kickstarted his career.
“It’s all syncing up this summer,” Clost laughs over Zoom. Packed with launch parties and premieres, it’s set to be summer in the purest sense. Yet the success is hard-earned. As Clost recounts his work, an intense schedule emerges: studying genre on set, learning to produce a film on the fly. “The Legacy of Cloudy Falls is the first time I worked on an indie. Fear Street was the first time I worked on a horror. There were a lot of big firsts happening; Loathe Thy Neighbor was my first time producing. I have really been trying to learn as an actor,” he explains.
That said, Clost is no newcomer to show business. He began dancing at age seven, which led to awards and competitions from Germany to New York. In 2012, Clost — still a few months shy of eighteen — booked his first main role on still-running teen drama The Next Step. Shot in a pseudo-documentary style, the series follows a dance troupe as they navigate adolescent wins and woes. For Clost, the quirky mix of comedy, drama, and dance built a natural bridge to acting.
“I loved acting, but I never considered myself an actor; I was a dancer growing up. It was really how I categorized my own identity,” Clost affirms. Early sessions in the dance studio were diverse in genre and style — Clost studied jazz, tap, ballet, and hip hop — and, in front of the camera, these interdisciplinary instincts paid off. “Through The Next Step, I fell in love with acting. I realized I had an affinity for it. I have always been someone that wears my heart on my sleeve, and I’m very sensitive; that really boded well for me with getting into acting.”
For a young actor, The Next Step proved to be fertile ground. Spending time on set, Clost cultivated his passion for performance, soaking up the techniques and talents on stage. He credits his peers for encouraging his ambitions, remembering a formative conversation that led into his Juilliard audition. “A friend of mine sort of mentored me during Juilliard. He was a fourth year when I was a first year, and him and I had gone to the same dance studio growing up for a bit of time, [so] we were in each other’s realms,” Clost tells me. “Before I even went to audition at Juilliard, and he was already at the school, his advice to me was: ‘Just be a sponge. Come in wide eyed and ready to absorb whatever you can, take away whatever you can, even from the audition alone.’ Then, I got into the school, and that was my goal — to just continue being a sponge and learning.”
As a student, Clost soon discovered that dance and drama are siblings. Both disciplines interpret abstract ideas through physical performance — stories become tangible. At Juilliard, these parallels become only more pronounced. “We took a class called ‘Elements of Performing,’ which was all about the use of your body in space. That was particular to on-stage, but I think about it so much for on-film as well,” Clost explains. “I do really approach my acting work through physicality — and vice-versa, too. I perform in The Nutcracker every Christmas and I’ve found myself now, as a dancer, really thinking like, ‘Okay, well, what is the narrative for this character in the piece?'”
These questions persist off-camera, too. During his downtime, Clost films his own work for YouTube. He didn’t have professional training, but if you watch his YouTube channel, you’d think otherwise. Videos range from casual behind-the-scenes moments on The Next Step to rehearsal outtakes and original choreography. It’s an outlet to explore the creative process. “I think I started my YouTube channel in like 2012. I was making fun skits and web series, and things like that. So, I’m used to the DIY, at-home setup kind of thing,” he laughs.
In fact, the “DIY kind of thing” comes as an antidote to a common Hollywood dilemma. “As it goes in the industry, there’s waves,” Clost puts it. “Sometimes, you’re really on and there’s tons of things happening or you’re auditioning like crazy. But there are a lot of times when, like, nothing’s happening.” Today, however, actors have more agency; in fact, some of Clost’s most consequential work came in the midst of an otherwise quiet period.
During the dual SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes of 2023, Clost found himself restless in Toronto. The industry was on pause while workers fought for better contracts from studio execs; and, though the guilds are American, Canada’s film industry felt the ripple effect. Yet — along with Tiny Pretty Things co-star Lauren Holly — Clost found a way to make the most of the moment.
“There’s a perception in the industry that you graduate from like the Canadian acting scene and move to Hollywood. But I really want great Canadian talent to stay in Canada and make great work here, so our industry can stand on its own two legs.”
Brennan Clost
“[Lauren Holly] knew I had this creative bug and always loved making things, and she’s similar in that way, so she was like, ‘Let’s make something. This is a great time to make something — a lot of productions will be halted, who knows what opportunities will come from making a movie in this time.’ And I was game,” Clost laughs. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, let’s make a short film,’ and Lauren said, like, ‘Fuck a short film. Let’s make a full feature!'” That’s how Brennan Clost came to produce Loathe Thy Neighbor, a dark comedy filmed in Bruce County, Ontario.
The process started off with a sprint. Location came first, Clost tells me; a 100-acre farm housed the cast and crew. Meanwhile, screenwriter Christian Majewski worked on the script at lighting speed. “Normally, movies get made in a very different way. The writer has their idea, they work on the script for, like, ages and ages and ages, then the location gets found, then the actors get found,” Clost says. “[We] reverse engineered the process. It really was collaborative and sort of a product of the time. We were like: ‘We have a location. These are all our friends that we would want to be in it. How do we write parts for all these people? What could the story be? Okay, when are we shooting? We better shoot it before the season changes!'”
Before filming, Clost spent a month preparing the property: assembling sets and props, learning hair and makeup, building a wardrobe. A skeleton staff — Clost estimates eight actors and eight crew members —turned each aspect into a group project. “So many talented friends of ours were available because of the strikes. Panavision gifted us a major lens package, pro-bono, because their equipment wasn’t being used. We got away with a lot and pulled so many favours that — had the strikes not happened — we couldn’t have ever made happen,” Clost laughs. The final, feature length film came roughly seven weeks after the first draft; compared to Loathe Thy Neighbor, Hollywood moves at a snails’ pace.
Thanks to his Youtube channel, skills like video editing and social media marketing came easily to Clost. “The digital space and social media have become so intertwined with traditional media, film and television,” says the actor. “It didn’t exist when I started acting. I think the year I started filming The Next Step was the year Instagram came out.”
“People now in their 20s will be like, ‘I grew up with [The Next Step],’ and I’m like, ‘No, I grew up with the show too!’ It impacted my life as much as — or more than — people watching.”
Brennan Clost
Shot on a shoestring budget in small-town Ontario, the production is a Canadian indie to its core. For the young actor, Loathe Thy Neighbor offered a fresh perspective on the industry. “There’s a perception in the industry that you graduate from like the Canadian acting scene and move to Hollywood,” Clost says. “But I really want great Canadian talent to stay in Canada and make great work here, so our industry can stand on its own two legs.” Canada’s film scene shares the sentiment: in 2024, TIFF chose Loathe Thy Neighbor as one of ten Industry Selects.
Producing the film was “a manifestation of a big dream,” Clost says, and Loathe Thy Neighbor inspired him to pursue more credits in the future. “It’s proven to me time and time again, in this industry, in this lifetime, that what you think about, you bring about,” he says. Yet, while he’d always wanted to produce a film, Clost stops short of citing a dream role or inspiration. “Growing up as a queer kid, there weren’t a lot of out queer male actors that I saw myself in, or that I saw that I could hold as, like, a role model per se,” says Clost. But that’s changing. “Now, there’s so much great representation and so many diverse stories. We’re seeing different sides of people. It’s not always the same character or caricature that we’re seeing again and again — we’re really getting to see, like, people,” he adds.
Before he jumps into film, however, Clost has one last goodbye to say. Returning for the tenth season of The Next Step, airing June 2025, was “nostalgic and sentimental” — even more than he anticipated. “It was really special to have everybody all together again, and to tie the bow on The Next Step together,” he says. “It’s so exciting that it ran for 10 seasons. None of us anticipated that when we started the show.” Revisiting his character, Daniel, was an especially sentimental moment. “I was 16 when I booked the show, and I’m 30 now. I feel like a completely different version of myself as Brennan, so it was really special to kind of revisit younger Brennan — to revisit a role that I originally did when I was 16 and I’ve grown up with,” Clost says. “People now in their 20s will be like, ‘I grew up with the show,’ and I’m like, ‘No, I grew up with the show too!’ It impacted my life as much as — or more than — people watching.”
As for his own next step? “I’m developing a project right now that I would direct, choreograph, write, maybe have a cameo in — but I don’t really want to. I really want to be behind the camera,” he says. In the meantime, Clost is keeping busy. In fact, on the day of our call, he has another film premiering: The Legacy of Cloudy Falls. Another Canadian production, the project was filmed in Niagara Falls; you’ll see Clost affect a Southern accent for his role as Lucas. “I love acting. I’d never, I don’t think I’ll ever stop acting,” he clarifies. But the drive to direct is, as he puts it, “the next little glimmer that I need to follow.”Â
