As UTA Opens New London Office, Its Bosses Promise to Maintain Co-Agent Relationships With ‘Biggest and Smallest’ U.K. Firms
When talent agency UTA opens shop in London on Thursday, it will be the latest American agency heavyweight to have a brick-and-mortar presence in the U.K.
The 28,000-square-foot office at 1 Newman Street straddles Fitzrovia and trendy Soho. Designed by Gensler and Modus Workspace, the new headquarters will be home to UTA’s music business as well as film and TV agents, and those working across everything from production arts to podcasting. The London office, which will be the agency’s European hub, will continue to be headed up by music agents Neil Warnock MBE and Obi Asika.
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UTA first carved out a presence in London in 2015 when it acquired British music practice The Agency Group. In 2021, the company expanded its footprint in music with the purchase of London-based Echo Location Talent Agency.
But it wasn’t until 2022 when UTA really sent shockwaves across the British entertainment sector with its acquisition of the venerable talent and literature agency Curtis Brown Group, where clients include Damien Lewis, Paapa Essiedu and Alicia Vikander. Local agents already rankled by an encroaching U.S. presence — largely fuelled by Britain’s production and streaming boom — now had even more reason to fear for their client lists. After all, as some cynics point out, what’s to stop British talent from using one mega-agency for both sides of the pond?
David Kramer, president of UTA, insists that the org will continue to maintain its co-agent relationships “with the biggest and smallest agencies” in the U.K.
“We realize the importance of the U.K. market and the talent that comes out of that market and the agent’s right to represent that talent at the very beginning of their career,” says Kramer. “We feel it’s a privilege to get the right to represent with those partners. So, we are very careful about making sure they feel completely in the loop on everything we’re doing. And they do the same for us.”
Kramer acknowledges the elbow-bumping that’s led to complaints about U.S. agency involvement, but insists: “We just wanted to make sure that didn’t happen with us to the best of our ability and I think we’ve done a really good job with that over the past couple of years.”
UTA London will have slightly over 100 employees to start, not including the Curtis Brown staff, who remain in a separate office a few blocks away. Everyone who’s part of the office at launch has already been U.K.-based, but Kramer’s vision is to embed agents from America in London as the operation gears up.
“We’re a company that likes for our people to travel to our offices — and not just visit. We often embed our people in different locations,” says Kramer. “We have people go and move to New York for a year or two, or spend time in London for several months. We’re going to continue to look at what opportunities present themselves [in the U.K.] for us to send our talented agents and executives over there. We built a big enough space that we can accommodate a lot more folks as time goes by.”
Kramer won’t be in London for the office launch, having travelled to the U.K. in April for the London Book Fair and already scheduled to return to Europe later this month. The spring fair was the first edition of the annual publishing event for a UTA-backed Curtis Brown.
“We had a huge contingent of people there, and we ended up having a big publishing party,” says Kramer. “It was quite the event.”
As UTA nears the one-year mark since buying Curtis Brown, Kramer reiterates that there are no plans to merge the two operations. “They operate on their own. Jonny Geller is the CEO, and they have directors that help run that company every day,” said the executive. “We’re here to, first, do no harm, and then be additive where we can be, but not disrupt the relationships they have.”
UTA’s timing in opening the London office amid month two of the WGA writers strike may ring some alarm bells. After all, Hollywood agencies are feeling the pain of a protracted strike with salary reductions and travel and expense cuts underway at some firms. From the very beginning, international has presented an obvious opportunity for production (even if the optics are unsavoury).
Yet Kramer — who says UTA is “1,000% supportive of what the WGA is doing” — argues that the strike “hasn’t changed how we look at the international market.”
“[International] is a really critical piece of our agency’s growth in terms of the talent that comes from around the world and the production opportunities for us to capitalize on,” says Kramer. “The short answer is that we want to be in those spaces for the talent and potential content opportunities that we can participate in. But the strike hasn’t driven that at this point.”
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