When Whitney Peak learned that she had booked a starring role in the upcoming Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping, which comes out next fall, the first thing she did was call her mom. “She didn’t know what The Hunger Games was,” says the 22-year-old actress. “She was just like, ‘Oh my God, you got a job!’”
Luckily, we need not wait until 2026 for Peak’s next performance. This weekend, she’s making her stage debut opposite Pamela Anderson in the Williamstown Theatre Festival production of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real. Peak plays Esmeralda, the gypsy from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and one of the multiple literary figures who populate the play.
“I’m absolutely terrified,” she says. “And I’m so excited. It’s going to be such a challenge, [but] I’m just hungry to learn.”
Peak was born in Kampala to an Ugandan mother and a Canadian father. Growing up, she spent her school years in Uganda and her summers in Abu Dhabi, where her father worked as a helicopter pilot, before relocating at age nine to Port Coquitlam, a small town outside Vancouver, with her parents and three older half-siblings.
By middle school, Peak’s parents had divorced. To pay the bills, her mother took a job at the Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons and, later, at Wendy’s, where Peak joined her part-time after turning 14. “I never knew acting was an option for me,” she says.
So when Peak heard a radio casting call for a Disney Channel show in 2015, she leapt at the opportunity. Her sister accompanied her to the audition, held at a hotel in Vancouver. The whole affair turned out to be a “complete scam” organized by a dubious agency, but she was nevertheless introduced to BCF Casting, a legitimate actor database. Through them, Peak booked a background role on the show Minority Report, where the actor Colin Lawrence introduced her to his agent, Mary Falcon, who continues to represent her today.
Within a year, Peak landed her first major role, as Idris Elba’s daughter Stella, in Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game, starring Jessica Chastain. “I didn’t really know who any of the cast were,” she admits.
It wasn’t until 2019 that she had her breakthrough moment. “I was in my social-studies class, and I got a call from my manager,” she recalls. He told her, “We have an audition for you. It’s for the reboot of Gossip Girl.”
At first, Peak tried not to get her hopes up. The glamorous world of Manhattan’s Upper East Side felt like foreign territory. “I [didn’t] think that I really fit in,” she says. But she sent in a video audition anyway and was cast as Zoya Lott, the reboot’s middle-class outsider, who echoes the original show’s Dan Humphrey character.
The role felt liberating for Peak. “I was making money,” she says. “I have autonomy over my life now, and I can choose which way I want to be, or what I want to do.”
Soon after moving to New York, where filming began in November 2020, she was introduced to the singer Sabrina Carpenter, who had also recently moved to the city. The two became close, and in 2022 the actress starred in Carpenter’s music video for her single “Nonsense.”
In addition to Camino Real, just this year she’s starred in the horror film Eye for an Eye and in Trap House, an action film with Dave Bautista, which comes out in November. She’s also been the face of Chanel’s Coco Mademoiselle fragrance for two years, following in the footsteps of past ambassadors Keira Knightley and Kate Moss. And 2026 is shaping up to be just as busy for Peak, with Shiver, a survival thriller; 4 Kids Walk into a Bank, a black-comedy heist film; and The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, where she’ll be seen alongside Ralph Fiennes, Elle Fanning, and Kieran Culkin.
Where does she find the energy? “I can’t really sit still for more than a couple of weeks before spiraling about what I’m gonna do next,” she says. “I think that just comes from my mom. She raised me to be very independent, work really hard, and just keep going.”
Camino Real is on at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, in Massachusetts, until August 3. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping will be released on November 20, 2026
Paulina Prosnitz is a Junior Editor at Air Mail
