Sam Riley
Sam Riley is an actor, born 1980.
Riley's break was abrupt and total: cast as Ian Curtis in Control in 2007, a black and white film about a singer many of its viewers had strong personal feelings about. It is one of the great debut leads, and it fixed his public image at twenty-seven in a way he has been negotiating with ever since.
The instrument is narrow and precisely used: a low, gravelled voice and a stillness that reads either as soulfulness or as a man who is not fully present, sometimes in the same shot. Directors who understand that get a great deal from it. Diaval in Maleficent and its sequel is a shapeshifted crow and the only honest character in either film, and Riley plays him with a servant's exhausted patience. Sal Paradise in On the Road has to narrate a book everybody has already decided about. Pinkie in Brighton Rock is all cold surface. His Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is performed completely straight, which is the only way that film works at all.
Since then he has worked mostly across Britain and Europe rather than chasing Hollywood: SS-GB, the alpine western The Dark Valley, Suite Française, Free Fire, Jack Favell in Rebecca, Pierre Curie in Radioactive, Thomas Seymour in Firebrand, Louis Bohne in Widow Clicquot. It is a career built on interesting choices rather than large ones.
Movies (20)
- Maleficent (2014)
- Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019)
- The Vault (2021)
- 13 (2010)
- Rebecca (2020)
- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)
- Free Fire (2017)
- On the Road (2012)
- Firebrand (2024)
- Suite Française (2015)
- Radioactive (2020)
- Byzantium (2013)
- Control (2007)
- Franklyn (2008)
- The Dark Valley (2014)
- Islands (2025)
- Brighton Rock (2010)
- Widow Clicquot (2024)
- Woman in Love (2011)
- Sometimes Always Never (2019)
TV (1)
Where to start with Sam Riley
Control first and it is not close. Anton Corbijn shot it in black and white and Riley carries it entirely, including the stage sequences, and nothing else on his record operates at that level.
For the second watch, On the Road is the flawed adaptation that gives him the most screen time, and Brighton Rock is the nastiest thing he has done, a young gangster with nothing behind the eyes. Maleficent is where most people have actually seen him and he is quietly the best thing in it. Free Fire is a warehouse shootout comedy where he plays a twitchy idiot and is very funny, which is not the register anyone associates with him. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is sillier than it sounds and his refusal to wink at it is the joke, and SS-GB is the alternate-history detective series for anyone who wants the voice at length.