Fred Hepburn
agent: Natalie Spanier - natalie@sternwild.com
Fred is a hands-on executive producer and creative showrunner known for delivering ambitious, award-winning documentaries and features for global audiences.
He has delivered limited series, feature length singles and long-running returning formats, taking projects from the first spark of an idea through greenlight, production, and delivery. His work spans access-driven unfolding narratives, archive-led retrospectives, and drama-doc hybrids, combining cinematic visual ambition with rigorous journalism. While his slate covers a broad range of subjects, he specialises in deep dives into contemporary culture — from tech power brokers and online subcultures to drug dealers, and organised crime groups. He has secured and conducted high-profile interviews with figures including Tony Blair, Biz Stone, Monica Lewinsky, and Jane Fonda, alongside hard-to-reach insiders, and whistleblowers. He has made programmes for Hulu, CNN, National Geographic, Discovery, the BBC, A&E and many others.
Fred's current project is October Film’s as showrunner on This Land Is Our Land, a major CNN Originals six-part series examining America’s contested past and what it reveals about the country today. The series blends sweeping, cinematic landscapes with intimate, vérité-style testimony and drama recre, bringing natural-history scale to deeply personal stories. It is set for release on CNN and HBO Max in June 2026. He directed the drama and key expert interviews.
A showrunner with strong creative vision, Fred has a background in directing and continues to direct key interviews and sequences, bringing a filmmaker’s eye to everything he produces. He is particularly known for shaping complex narratives in the edit, navigating high-stakes legal and rights issues, and building trust with contributors in sensitive or high-risk environments.
His recent work includes Twitter: Breaking the Bird, the critically acclaimed CNN Originals/BBC series charting the rise and moral collapse of the world’s most influential social media platform. The series received four-star reviews across the UK broadsheets and was praised by the San Francisco Chronicle as “an epic tale of tech triumph and lost idealism.”
Calm, collaborative, and highly hands-on, Fred is known for building strong creative teams and close relationships with commissioners and executives. Across his career, he has overseen projects from development through multiple returning seasons and was a key creative force behind Nutopia’s long-running Decades brand for National Geographic — a premium pop-culture and history franchise still commissioning new episodes more than a decade after launch.