Rupert Friend

Rupert Friend’s career is honestly kind of wild when you look at it—he’s one of those guys who pops up everywhere, always playing someone totally different. Early on, he made some noise in The Libertine and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, snagging awards for best newcomer, which, let’s be real, doesn’t happen unless you’ve got something special going on. Then he showed up as George Wickham in Pride & Prejudice (yep, the “bad boy” of Austen’s world), and a few years later he’s in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, playing a Nazi officer, which is about as far from a romantic period drama as you can get. He kept switching things up—suddenly he’s Prince Albert in The Young Victoria (fancy, right?), then a psychologist in Starred Up, and then Peter Quinn in Homeland, which is probably where a lot of people recognize him from. Quinn’s this intense, sometimes broken, CIA guy, and Friend seriously made the role his own. He’s also shown up as Vasily Stalin in The Death of Stalin (dark comedy, very dry humor), Theo van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate, and Ernest Donovan in Strange Angel, which is all about rocketry and weird cult stuff. Lately, he’s been hanging out in Wes Anderson’s cinematic universe, popping up in The French Dispatch and Asteroid City, plus that Netflix flick about Henry Sugar. Oh, and in 2022, he played a British politician in Anatomy of a Scandal—one of those scandal-ridden, messy types—and somehow found time to join Star Wars as the Grand Inquisitor in Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney+. The dude’s got range.