In this FRONTPAGE interview, we speak to Swedish actor and singer Omar Rudberg on his status as a heartthrob for the next generation.
When Omar Rudberg first met his Young Royals co-star, Edvin Ryding, it wasn’t a meet-cute. It was a meet-stressed, mixed with a bit of meet-sweaty. For Rudberg, landing a second audition for the Swedish Netflix series had put him on the verge of a big break; a first step towards launching an acting career after years spent entrenched in the music scene as part of an award-winning boy band. As he burst into the chemistry read for the series five minutes late, there was no time to introduce himself to the person who would become his co-star. “I was so scared,” he recalls of the audition that would change his life. “I sat next to him and we just started. We met for the first time in character, basically, and it was just there. It was natural. It was perfect.”
As they settled into their scene, Rudberg still recalls the awe he felt in the presence of Ryding, whose acting career had begun at six-years-old. “I remember thinking, ‘Damn, this guy is so good.’ I was shocked. He was so natural. I just went with him in his flow. I was like, ‘I have to get this part.’ I did the whole thing. I started touching his hair and all of that. He laid on my lap. It was a moment, for sure.” For those who have watched even a single episode of Young Royals, their instant chemistry is no surprise.
Set almost entirely at Hillerska, a fictional boarding school for the teens of Sweden’s wealthiest families, the series’ emotional epicenter rests on the budding romance between working-class student Simon Eriksson (Rudberg) and Prince Wilhelm (Ryding), the youngest son of the country’s Queen. Across two seasons — and with a third and final season due later this year — the spark between the two actors has been electrifying; providing the high-voltage energy that has catapulted the small Swedish show and its young stars to worldwide fame. While the concept of a show about teens navigating first loves and the pressure of being young, hormonal, and stressed has never been in short supply, Elite: Sweden or The Crown: Teen Years this is not.
Under the guidance of the creator, head writer, and showrunner Lisa Ambjörn, the series simply hits different, bringing an authenticity that feels tonally akin to the Norwegian series Skam. It deftly weaves through the overstuffed genre, sidestepping the artificiality inherent in shows where 30-year-old models with perfect skin play angsty teens. Instead, Young Royals has presented teenagers as they are; drawing praise for not covering up their acne or yassifying the awkward, hormonally challenging march toward adulthood. Although the series hinges on the titular “young royal” Prince Wilhelm, it’s Rudberg’s character Simon who acts as a vital counterweight to the upper crust that populates Hillerska.
Far from this fictional setting, Rudberg now sits in a nondescript restaurant in Gothenburg for our video call. Dressed in comfortable white sweats and radiating calm, it’s difficult to fathom that his mere presence could send thousands of fans into hysterics. At the moment, he could pass for just another local youth out with his mom for lunch, but that may be part of the charm. While Rudberg has the unique quality of being chameleonic, able to shift effortlessly from role to role, it’s clear the Swedish-Venezuelan star brought pieces of his own upbringing to his Royals role.
After he and his mom, Wilner, immigrated to Sweden from Caracas when Rudberg was six, the two navigated the othering that comes from settling into a country whose population is overwhelmingly white. His first few years were spent at a Gothenburg school surrounded by many other immigrant kids, including Latin Americans, but things took a stark turn when he and his family moved to the small coastal village of Åsa. “That [marked] a turn in my life,” he recalls as Wilnur sits just offscreen. “My mom and I were the only immigrants in the village, the only people that didn't speak Swedish quite well. At my school, I was the only one from another country. The kids didn't really understand me.”
While he endured taunting that cast a dark cloud over his childhood, it never broke his spirit. Instead, it served to strengthen the bond with his mom, who once came to his school to accost one of his bullies before Rudberg stopped her — a tale that Wilnur now laughs at just offscreen as Rudberg reminisces. After the bullying intensified, Rudberg moved to a bigger city and a bigger school that was “a little more balanced when it came to the students.” It was a switch that eased the peer pressure, but also served to mark the start of his music career; a start now immortalized in two grainy YouTube videos uploaded to his mom’s account in February 2010.
With the collar of a white button-down poking over his sparkly blue blazer, a young Rudberg belts out “Livin’ La Vida Loca” (and takes a few dance breaks) during an audition for Talang, Sweden’s version of Got Talent, as an unseen crowd screams in joy. The audio is tinny and the video is potato-quality, but as the performance ends and the crowd shouts his name, one thing is crystal clear: Rudberg has a charm and confidence well beyond his then 11-year-old self. Buoyed by the unyielding support of Wilnur, he stayed the course and continued to push his way into the music industry. “Back in the day, people didn't see it as a serious thing,” he recalls. “People were like, ‘Oh yeah, he's singing. Whatever.’ They didn't really get that I wanted to become something.”
The “something” he became wasn’t just a singer competing on reality shows. Three years after competing on Talang, Rudberg was recruited by Artist House Stockholm for a new boy band called The FOOO — an acronym for members Felix Sandman, Oscar Enestad, Olly Molander, and Omar Rudberg’s first names. Weathering two name changes (RIP to The Fooo Conspiracy) and one dropped member (sorry, Olly Molander), the band became known as FO&O and developed a fervent fanbase from their very first live performance, which happened to be as Justin Bieber’s opening act in Globen in 2013. For four years, the band continued to perform for fans (including, coincidentally, his future Royals costar, Edvin). By the time they’d amassed over 80 million streams, opened for One Direction, and won multiple awards, the band reached the “taking a hiatus to pursue solo projects”-era of the boy band life cycle in 2017.
One year later, Rudberg dropped his debut single "Que Pasa," launching a solo career that has allowed for a level of creative freedom that evaded him during his FO&O era. Freed from the confines of being in a very Swedish boy band, Rudberg has excavated his Latin American roots, mixing Spanish, Swedish, and English into his songs. It's a combo that proved potent and confirmed that his years of grinding paid off; the star now commands over 869,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and has over eight million streams on his recent single, “Mi Casa Su Casa.” Though Rudberg could have easily stuck to cultivating his music career, there was a deep desire to do more — and he found his opportunity to branch out with Young Royals.
The entry into acting was less a leap of faith and more a natural next step in his journey. “I felt that I had it in me in some way,” he admits, ensconcing himself further into his fluffy, oversized white hoodie. Now three years into juggling both singing and acting, he’s also begun to chart a path in the fashion world, with Valentino Beauty ads and front-row seats at Paris Fashion Week. Through it all, Rudberg has proven adept at embracing stardom and, more importantly, navigating the oft-toxic world of fandom. His social media following has surpassed four million followers, and in the hyperactive, overly online stan culture, a population of strangers the size of a small country watching your every move can quickly become crushing. It’s a topic not far from Rudberg’s mind, and as the conversation turns to online fame, the radiant calm that had emanated from Rudberg begins to chip away.
“You don't feel strong when thousands of people are telling you something that you have to do. You feel weak and you feel scared. I know that feeling, and it’s so annoying when people are like that. I don't listen to the internet because they come and they correct you if you do something wrong, but the internet is literally hell. I don't owe [the] internet shit. The internet can be so cruel to people,” he says as we discuss last year’s forced coming-out of Kit Connor, whose role in the Netflix series Heartstopper brought international fame — but also a torrent of pressure — to the young star. Besides two brief statements about not wanting to label his sexuality, once in 2019 and once in 2021, Rudberg has no intention of expanding on this part of his life. “Me not talking about my personal life is because I want to keep something to myself,” he explains. “I don't really feel the pressure of coming out with information about myself because I don't really read much that people say.”
“People live in their own fantasy. [They] think that they know what I am and what my sexuality is,” he adds, with an air of defiance. “I’ve never said that I'm queer in my life, but people keep on saying that I'm queer. They see me in an outfit and they say, ‘He's gay.’ They see me in makeup [and say,] ‘Yeah, he's queer.’ You know what I mean? Tomorrow, I could feel completely different, change styles completely, and date somebody that you’d never think I would date.” Rather than open the most intimate details of his life to the public, the star instead looks to people like Rihanna and Frank Ocean for guidance on how to avoid digital noise.
After turning 24 in November, Rudberg can now say that he’s spent half his life in the spotlight. With a clear-sightedness honed from all those years spent under the harsh glare of fame, Rudberg has largely avoided the culture’s toxic underbelly — and seems poised to continue keeping far way from the social media fervor. As he finishes filming the final season of Young Royals and plans the release of a new slate of music, he’s kept a laser-sharp focus and a busy schedule, appearing in the debut season of Drag Race Sverige, flying to Los Angeles for recording studio sessions, and wrapping up his feature film debut in the survival horror film, Karusell. It’s a meteoric rise that could easily balloon any young star’s ego, but it’s clear that beyond the designer clothes and dazzling music videos, Rudberg’s true essence is more akin to the character that fans (and Wilhem) fell in love with in that pivotal first scene of Young Royals: standing out from the crowd with a dazzling smile across his face, singing his tune straight from the heart.
