After playing the lead role of American playwright John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation, Oparei scored their next supporting film role, as "Le Chocolat", in the Baz Luhrmann film Moulin Rouge!.
In 1993, they appeared in an episode of the popular British television series Minder as 'Winston', a worker for Arthur Daley.
Operai moved to Sydney, Australia in 1995,[4] where they co-hosted the regular night 'Magic' upstairs at Kinselas with Basil,[5] and performed Operai's Queen bitch rap in cLUB bENT at The Performance Space, with Darren Spowart and Matthew Bergin.
their first play, Crazyblackmuthafuckin'self, a dramedy about race, sexuality and identity, opened to critical acclaim at the Royal Court Theatre in 2002.
[8] In 2015, Oparei joined the cast of the HBO epic fantasy series Game of Thrones in its fifth season, portraying the character Areo Hotah.