Nicholas Galitzine

About a decade of being cast for his face, and a visible effort to work against it. Galitzine's early leads were teen films, High Strung (2016) and Handsome Devil (2017), the second an Irish school story that handed him a closeted rugby star and considerably more to play than the type usually gets. Before those he appeared in an episode of Legends and made his debut in The Beat Beneath My Feet, which is not among the credits listed here.

The streaming romances made him a name. Purple Hearts (2022), Red, White and Royal Blue (2023) and The Idea of You (2024) arrived in consecutive years and did the same job in three registers: military melodrama, political romance, and an older-woman story where he plays a boy-band frontman. He is good in them in a particular way, playing men who are being looked at and letting you watch them notice it. He also sang on the soundtrack of Cinderella (2021).

The more interesting work sits next to those. Bottoms (2023) has him playing a preening idiot of a football star with total commitment, which is the hardest thing on this list to do badly and still be funny. Mary and George (2024) casts him as George Villiers climbing the Jacobean court through seduction, and is the first project to treat his beauty as a subject rather than an asset. Masters of the Universe, dated 2026 here, puts him in the lead as Adam, which will settle whether the romantic-lead phase was a stage or a ceiling.