Joseph Morgan
Joseph Morgan is an actor, born 1981.
One character reshaped Morgan's career and then took it over completely. Before Klaus Mikaelson he was climbing the standard English-actor ladder: Gower College Swansea, then Troy in the first series of Sky One's Hex in 2004, supporting parts in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and Alexander, the BBC Two adaptation The Line of Beauty, William Price in Mansfield Park, the title role in the 2010 Ben Hur miniseries, Lysander in Immortals.
Then his Vampire Diaries role grew into the lead of a spin-off, and The Originals was built around him. What makes it work is that he plays charm as a delivery mechanism for threat. The warmth is real and the menace is real, and he refuses to separate them into different scenes, which is the reason a supporting part turned into a franchise. The awards attached to it are audience-voted rather than industry ones, which is the correct shape for that particular achievement.
Since then he has moved through genre television without landing anything of that size: Sebastian Sanger in Titans, CJack60 in Brave New World, James Ackerson in Halo, Young Jed in Animal Kingdom, Nathan in the small horror film Open Grave. The talent is not the question; the vehicle is.
Movies (8)
TV (10)
Where to start with Joseph Morgan
Two shows, one character, and the order matters. The Vampire Diaries is where Klaus arrives, and you do not need the entire run to reach him, but the show has to establish him before the spin-off means anything at all.
Then The Originals, which is the actual body of work. He leads it, and it is a more gothic and more operatic thing than its parent show ever was.
Outside those, the options thin out fast. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is comfortably the best film he appears in, small part or not. Immortals is the handsome nonsense, Halo is the recent prestige-budget television, and Open Grave is the low-budget horror that shows what he does with no support around him.
The genre television
Klaus was written for a few episodes of The Vampire Diaries and ended up with a five-season spin-off, which is about as clear a verdict as television gives. The later genre work trades on the same menace.
The period work
He started in costume drama at twenty two and has kept returning to it ever since. Master and Commander and The Line of Beauty are the two worth seeking out, the second giving him rather more to work with than the naval epic did.
The films
A smaller and stranger list. Mister Lonely casts him as a James Dean impersonator living in a commune of celebrity lookalikes, which is exactly as odd as it sounds.