Alex Lanipekun
Alex Lanipekun is an actor, born 1981.
He left the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before finishing the course, because Spooks offered him Ben Kaplan and the BBC does not wait. He joined that series in 2007 and stayed two years, arriving as the new recruit among people who had already learned not to trust each other, which is a useful assignment for a young actor: everything unpolished about him read as inexperience, and the writing wanted exactly that.
Television has been the substance of the career since. Saul in Being Human, Raafi Al-Qadar in Riviera, Tycho in Domina, Daniel Sands in The Rising. He also appeared in Troy: Fall of a City, which is not among the credits listed here. The through line is competence under suspicion. He keeps being cast as men who are good at their jobs and not entirely trusted by the people around them, and he plays that with a stillness that reads as integrity or as concealment depending on what the scene needs, which is a genuinely useful thing to be able to do.
The film credits are honest about their size: a precocious PC in Blitz, a Special Branch agent in Grimsby, Kraviz in Curvature, Andrew Rutherford in The Titan, Ty in Love Blossoms. Greenland 2: Migration is the biggest thing he has been attached to. He is known for his stage work as well, which is the part of the career a list of screen credits cannot show you.
Movies (6)
TV (5)
Where to start with Alex Lanipekun
Spooks is where to begin, specifically the stretch of series with Ben Kaplan in it. British spy television at its most efficient, and it treats a new recruit as a genuine liability rather than an audience surrogate. Domina next, a Roman power drama much better cast than it was reviewed, with him as Tycho. The Rising is the most uneven thing here, though his Daniel Sands is a steady presence inside it. Riviera is glossy nonsense played with total conviction, and Being Human is an early small part in a genuinely inventive series. Of the films, The Titan is the one with an idea in it, even though it fumbles the idea, and Greenland 2: Migration is the one to watch for.