George Blagden
George Blagden is an actor, born 1989.
Blagden's first widely seen part was Grantaire in the 2012 film of Les Miserables, the cynic who drinks his way through the barricade scenes. The year after, he was cast as Athelstan on Vikings, the captured English monk pulled into a Norse world and slowly taken apart by it.
Athelstan is the role that shows what he does. The part is almost entirely internal, a man arguing with himself about God while everyone around him swings an axe, and Blagden plays doubt as something physical rather than soulful. He can hold a scene without saying much, which is presumably why the production gave the character a short companion series of his own, told as a journal.
Versailles set him the opposite problem. As Louis XIV he was no longer the man being swept along but the one generating the current, a king performing kingship for a court that never stops watching. It is his largest role and the one the French production was built around.
Away from acting he narrates. He recorded the Penguin Classics audiobook of Homer's Odyssey, and an audio tour of the Circus Maximus in Rome written by Margaret George. The film credits in between are smaller: a soldier in Wrath of the Titans, a philosophy student in After the Dark, a part in the science fiction picture Rubikon, a couple of low-budget horror entries.
Movies (5)
TV (3)
Where to start with George Blagden
Start with Vikings. Athelstan is the best-written part he has had and the one that uses his particular knack for playing a man who cannot decide what he believes. If you finish it and want the footnote, Vikings: Athelstan's Journal is a short companion piece in the same voice.
Then Versailles, the bigger showcase: costume drama thick with scheming, and a lead performance that keeps Louis XIV cold and watchful rather than grand. After the Dark is the odd one, a talky classroom thought experiment that either grips you or does not, and Wrath of the Titans and Rubikon are for completists. His Grantaire in the 2012 Les Miserables film is worth seeking out too, though that credit is not among the ones listed here.