Elyes Gabel
Elyes Gabel is an actor, born 1983.
Elyes Gabel is a British actor whose career has been shaped by two long television jobs and a handful of well-chosen small film parts. He was a regular on the BBC hospital drama Casualty from 2004 to 2007 as Dr. Gurpreet Sandhu, then did a series of Waterloo Road and the ITV drama Identity, which is the standard route through British television.
Two things changed his profile. He played Rakharo, one of the Dothraki, in the first two seasons of Game of Thrones, at the point when the show was still a cult concern rather than a global one. And in 2014 he took the lead in the CBS series Scorpion as Walter O'Brien, a self-described genius running a team of consultants, which ran four seasons and gave him a level of American recognition that nothing else in his work has matched. Scorpion is broad, silly network television and he plays it earnestly, which is the correct choice.
The film work is the more interesting half. He is the young virologist attached to the mission in World War Z, a small part in Interstellar, and Julian in A Most Violent Year, a driver in well over his head in a film about the cost of trying to do business honestly. These are all minor roles in ambitious pictures and he wastes none of them. He turns up next in The Odyssey.
Movies (8)
TV (5)
Where to start with Elyes Gabel
There is not much of a canon here, so pick by mood. A Most Violent Year is the best film he has been in and the one that uses him properly: a small, frightened performance inside a very controlled crime drama.
World War Z hands him the single most important scene of exposition in a blockbuster that otherwise never slows down. Scorpion is the volume play, four seasons of preposterous network procedural that is far more entertaining than its reputation if you accept the terms on offer. Dead Set is the early British curio, a zombie series set inside a reality television house, and it is nastier than anything else he has done. Interstellar and Spooks: The Greater Good are for completists. The Odyssey is the one that could change the shape of this list.