Matthew Macfadyen

Matthew Macfadyen made his television debut in 1998 as Hareton Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights and spent the early 2000s as Tom Quinn, the lead of the BBC spy series Spooks. Born in Great Yarmouth in 1974, he was for about a decade the sort of leading man British television produces in quantity: tall, capable, slightly sad.

Pride & Prejudice in 2005 was the first sign of something stranger. His Mr. Darcy is not haughty, he is socially terrified, and the choice reframes the whole book: a man too anxious to speak reads as arrogant until you watch him actually try. That interpretation divided people at the time and has aged extremely well.

Succession made it undeniable. Tom Wambsgans, played across the HBO series from 2018 to 2023, is a man who absorbs humiliation from above and passes it directly downward, and Macfadyen finds every gradation of that: the ingratiating warmth, the panic underneath, the cruelty that arrives whenever he finds someone lower down. The role brought him two Primetime Emmy Awards, two BAFTA TV Awards and a Golden Globe, and his awards record here also includes a Screen Actors Guild ensemble award.

The film work runs alongside and is more varied than the fame suggests. Oblonsky in Anna Karenina, John Birt in Frost/Nixon, the smoothly useless HR man in The Assistant, Charles Cholmondeley in Operation Mincemeat, the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, Athos in The Three Musketeers, and Mr. Paradox in Deadpool & Wolverine. On television he was Inspector Edmund Reid in Ripper Street and Charles Ingram in Quiz.