Jack Lowden
Jack Lowden is an actor, born 1990.
Four years on stage came first, and it shows in the way Jack Lowden handles a long scene. His first international screen success was the BBC's War & Peace in 2016 as Nikolai Rostov, which opened the film door almost immediately.
What follows is one of the odder patterns in British acting: he plays real people constantly. Morrissey in England Is Mine. The golfer Tommy Morris in Tommy's Honour. Tony Benn in A United Kingdom. Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction. Lord Darnley in Mary Queen of Scots. Kenny Noye in The Gold. Zak Knight in Fighting with My Family. A third of his filmography is somebody who existed, which takes a specific kind of casting confidence, because the audience arrives with an opinion already formed.
The skill is a refusal to flatter. Darnley is petulant, his Morrissey is insufferable, Noye is frightening, and Lowden plays all three without slipping in a wink to tell you he knows. Calibre, a small Scottish thriller in which he makes one bad decision after another, is the purest demonstration.
Slow Horses turned him into a fixture. River Cartwright is written as a young agent who assumes he is the lead of the show and keeps being told otherwise, and Lowden gets the comedy out of that without making him pathetic. The role has brought him two Primetime Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe nomination. Recent work includes Tornado and Ella McCay.
Movies (16)
TV (5)
Where to start with Jack Lowden
Slow Horses first, for the simple reason that it is the best-written thing he is in and the one where his particular quality, wounded confidence, is the actual engine of the part.
Then Calibre, the film to watch if you want to know how good he is. It is small, Scottish and increasingly unbearable, and he carries it almost alone. Benediction is the other essential, a quiet and very sad performance as Sassoon that got nothing like the attention it deserved.
England Is Mine is a young Morrissey played entirely without affection, which is the right call. Dunkirk is the biggest film he has been in and the one that gives him the least room, which makes it a good measure of how much he can do with a little. War and Peace is where it started, and Fighting with My Family and '71 fill in the range.