Ed Speleers
Ed Speleers is an actor, born 1988.
Being handed a fantasy franchise as a teenager is not the gift it looks like. Speleers, born in Chichester in 1988, played the title role in Eragon in 2006, a film built to launch a series of sequels that never arrived, which left a very young actor holding a lead role in a story with nowhere to go.
What he did next was the unglamorous, correct thing: went back to British television and small films and learned the job. Jimmy Kent on Downton Abbey, Edward Seymour in Wolf Hall, Carl Denim in Partners in Crime, a run of low-budget genre pictures including A Lonely Place to Die, Plastic, Howl and Witchville. None of it was prestigious. All of it was practice.
The lane he eventually found is worth naming precisely: charming men you should not trust. Stephen Bonnet on Outlander is written as the antagonist and Speleers plays him with an easy, likeable surface, which is why the character works at all. He did a version of the same thing as Rhys Montrose in the fourth season of You. The trick is that he never signals; the charm is real, and the audience is left doing its own arithmetic.
Recently the casting has shifted again, towards legacy roles and franchise inheritance. He played Jack Crusher in the third season of Star Trek: Picard, walking into a decades-old franchise carrying a famous surname, and got away with it. Alongside that sits lighter work: Irish Wish, Against the Ice, Midas Man, Breathe. The Eragon kid turned into a reliable character actor, which is a better outcome than the one originally planned for him.
Movies (14)
TV (10)
Where to start with Ed Speleers
Ignore the chronology and start with Outlander. Stephen Bonnet is the role that defines what he does best, and the performance is the reason it lands rather than curdling.
Star Trek: Picard is the other essential, a legacy part in a season built almost entirely on affection for the past, where he has to be new and familiar at once. You is the third of the trio and the most contained.
For the earlier work, Downton Abbey shows him inside a big ensemble and Wolf Hall inside a very good one. A Lonely Place to Die and Howl are the scrappy British genre years, both better than their budgets. And Eragon is where it began, though watch it for the curiosity rather than the film.