By: George Morrow
The Canadian actor and dancer has spent a decade quietly stacking credits across television, Disney, and the international stage. At 26, he’s starting to write his own.
Most performers who break out at sixteen spend the next decade chasing the high. Noah Zulfikar has done the opposite. The Toronto- and Los Angeles-based actor, now 26, has been working steadily since 2015, when he was cast as Kingston on The Next Step, the Canadian teen drama that quietly built one of the most loyal young audiences in international television. A decade in, he’s still on that show’s books, still touring with it, still booking new dramatic work, and now writing his own scripts. There’s no fireworks moment in the timeline. That seems to be the point.
A Mississauga Start That Stuck
Zulfikar grew up in Mississauga, Ontario, and trained for years at the Canadian Dance Company in Oakville before The Next Step’s casting team came through his studio. He didn’t book it on the first try, or the second. He came up through callbacks and persistence, eventually landing a role in Kingston for season five and staying on for a run he puts at more than 75 episodes. That’s a long enough stretch to grow up on screen, which audiences in the UK, Australia, and beyond did right alongside him. The kind of slow exposure money usually can’t buy.
The show itself is a phenomenon Americans tend to underestimate. It ran for over a decade on Family Channel in Canada and CBBC in the UK, ending only in late 2025. For Zulfikar, that meant something rarer than virality: a recurring set, recurring co-stars, recurring fans who watched him develop in real time.
The Disney Detour
Family Channel is one thing. The Disney machine is another. Zulfikar slid into supporting roles in Zombies 2 (2020) and Zombies 3 (2022), two of Disney’s most dependable musical franchises for the under-fifteen set. The parts weren’t leads, and he doesn’t oversell them. What they did give him was something practical: time on bigger sets, exposure to studio-scale production, and an audience that recognizes him without needing the dance context.
He’s also taken pains to do work that doesn’t fit either of those tidy boxes. A principal role in The Village Keeper, a quieter Canadian feature, sits on his IMDb page as a deliberate gear shift. He has a series-regular slot in Between the Fences, an upcoming project currently in production. Whether that one hits is anyone’s guess. But the choice tells you he’s aiming somewhere different than the next dance movie.
Back to the Stage, on a Bigger Map
Earlier this year, Zulfikar suited up for The Next Step Legacy World Tour, a reunion run that hit the UK, Canada, and Australia. He puts the live numbers at more than thirty shows and roughly 40,000 ticket buyers. Anyone who’s worked a touring circuit knows what that means in practice. Late buses, two-show days, the kind of muscle memory you can’t fake.
His Instagram following, well over 100,000, is large enough to matter and small enough to feel real, which is increasingly the more valuable position. His TikTok sits in the high tens of thousands, putting him in the bracket where brands still call but the algorithm hasn’t flattened him into a content machine. The work still leads. The platforms follow.
Writing His Way Forward
The most interesting thing about Zulfikar at this stage isn’t on his résumé. It’s the short film script he’s been writing, one he plans to star in and shepherd through development himself. He talks about it the way a lot of mid-career performers eventually do, framing it as a way to step out of the audition cycle long enough to make something specific on his own terms.
He’s still studying, too. Armstrong Acting Studios in Toronto. Anthony Meindl’s workshop in Los Angeles. Self-tape coaching at Hotshots in LA and The Craft back home. That’s not the schedule of a working actor coasting on old credits. It’s the schedule of someone who watched what happened to colleagues who stopped training and decided not to be one of them.
The Long View
What’s notable about Zulfikar isn’t a single role or a follower count. It’s the project’s durability. He’s been employed in this business since before he could legally drink in his own country. He’s diversified across television, live performance, Disney, and now writing, without burning out the brand or chasing the wrong rooms. And he’s based in the two cities, Toronto and Los Angeles, where a North American actor with international fans actually has to live to keep working.
The next twelve months will be telling. Between the Fences will land. The short film will or won’t get made. The Legacy tour wraps, and the question becomes what fills the calendar next. For now, Zulfikar seems content to let the work answer that question. Most actors his age would kill for that.
