Harry Potter dream cast

Jared Francis Harris was born in London, England. He is the son of Irish actor Richard Harris and Welsh actress Elizabeth Harris (Elizabeth Rees), and brother of Damian Harris and Jamie Harris. Despite his lineage, Jared showed little interest in becoming an actor, until he was cast in a college production while attending North Carolina's Duke University (USA), where he studied drama and literature, in the early 1980s.

After graduation, Jared returned to the UK where he attended Central School of Speech and Drama and then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, performing in Mark Rylance's "Hamlet", "Romeo & Juliet", "The Silent Woman" and "A Clockwork Orange". In 1989, he had his screen debut in The Rachel Papers (1989).

In 1990, while on vacation in New York, Jared auditioned for the role of Hotspur in "Henry IV, Part 1", which he played at the New York Shakespeare Festival following his brilliant course as an excellent theater artist in the off-Broadway play "Ecstasy", for which he was honored with an Obie Award in 1992.

Widely regarded as the one of greatest stage and screen actors both in his native Great Britain and internationally, from his breakthrough role as Andy Warhol in I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) and VH1's Two of Us (2000) where he portrayed John Lennon to Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) and Lincoln (2012), Jared Harris expressed his unparalleled qualities as a sublime "chameleon" in a wide range of roles full of profoundness, intelligence and insights through his praised performances, among others, in The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Natural Born Killers (1994), Smoke (1995), Happiness (1998), How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog (2000), Igby Goes Down (2002), B. Monkey (1998), Shadow Magic (2000), Mr. Deeds (2002), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).

His tour-de-force mesmerizing, staggering and fascinating interpretations of substantial mastery, subtlety, charisma and generosity also include some of his finest precious gems on TV such as in The Other Boleyn Girl (2003), The Riches (2007), Fringe (2008), Mad Men (2007), The Crown (2016), The Terror (2018) and Chernobyl (2019).

Jared is married to Allegra Riggio, lauded intelligent lighting designer and accidental comedian.

Thomas William Hiddleston was born in Westminster, London, to English-born Diana Patricia (Servaes) and Scottish-born James Norman Hiddleston. His mother is a former stage manager, and his father, a scientist, was the managing director of a pharmaceutical company. He started off at the preparatory school, The Dragon School in Oxford, and by the time he was 13, he boarded at Eton College, at the same time that his parents were going through a divorce. He continued on to the University of Cambridge, where he earned a double first in Classics. He continued to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, from which he graduated in 2005.

Whilst at University of Cambridge, he was seen by the Hamilton Hodell agency in the play "A Streetcar Named Desire" and was signed. Following this, he was cast in his first television role in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (2001). Hiddleston won his first film role as Oakley in Joanna Hogg's award-winning first feature, Unrelated (2007). His breakthrough role came when he portrayed the nemesis Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe feature film Thor (2011). He reprised the character in The Avengers (2012), Thor: The Dark World (2013), Thor: Ragnarok (2017), and Avengers: Infinity War (2018).

He has also appeared in Steven Spielberg's War Horse (2011), The Deep Blue Sea (2011), Woody Allen's romantic comedy Midnight in Paris (2011), and the romantic vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). On television, he appeared on the BBC series The Hollow Crown (2012), in the adaptations of Shakespeare's "Henry IV" and "Henry V". In theatre, he has been in the productions of "Cymbeline" (2007) and "Ivanov" (2008). In December 2013, he starred as the title character in the Donmar Warehouse production of "Coriolanus" which played until February 2014. He won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Newcomer in a Play for his role in "Cymbeline" while also being nominated for the same award the same year for his role as Cassio in "Othello".

Dev Patel was born in London's Harrow district to Anita, a caregiver, and Raj, who works in IT; hailing from Nairobi, Kenya, they are both of Gujarati-Indian descent. Patel secured his first professional acting gig playing Anwar on the cult hit television series Skins (2007), where he starred for two seasons. His mainstream breakout came soon thereafter, when he was cast as Jamal in Danny Boyle's Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008), for which he received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor.

Subsequent film projects have included The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011), Chappie (2015), Hotel Mumbai (2018), and The Green Knight (2021). For his portrayal of real-life Australian businessman Saroo Brierley in Lion (2016), where he co-starred with Nicole Kidman, Patel received glowing reviews and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. His directorial debut was the critically lauded Monkey Man (2024), in which he also starred.

An only child, Idrissa Akuna Elba was born and raised in London, England. His father, Winston, is from Sierra Leone and worked at Ford Dagenham; his mother, Eve, is from Ghana and had a clerical duty. Idris attended school in Canning Town, where he first became involved in acting, before he dropped out. He gained a place in the National Youth Music Theatre - thanks to a £1,500 Prince's Trust grant. To support himself between acting roles, he worked in jobs such as tyre-fitting, cold call advertising sales, and working night shifts at Ford Dagenham. He worked in nightclubs under the nickname DJ Big Driis at age 19, but began auditioning for television roles in his early-twenties.

His first acting roles were on the soap opera Family Affairs (1997), the television serial Ultraviolet (1998), and the medical drama Dangerfield (1995). His best known roles are as drug baron Russell "Stringer" Bell on the HBO series The Wire (2002), as DCI John Luther on the BBC One series Luther (2010), and as Heimdall in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He later starred in the films Daddy's Little Girls (2007), Prom Night (2008), RocknRolla (2008), The Unborn (2009) and Obsessed (2009). He also appeared in the films American Gangster (2007), Takers (2010), Thor (2011), Prometheus (2012), Pacific Rim (2013), Thor: The Dark World (2013), Beasts of No Nation (2015) and Star Trek Beyond (2016). He voiced Chief Bogo in Zootopia (2016), Shere Khan in The Jungle Book (2016), and Fluke in Finding Dory (2016).

Idris Elba was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II at the 2016 New Years Honours for his services to drama.

Olivia Colman was born on 30 January 1974 in Norwich, Norfolk, England, UK. She is an actress and producer, known for The Favourite (2018), Tyrannosaur (2011) and The Lost Daughter (2021). She has been married to Ed Sinclair since August 2001. They have three children.

Nicholas Hoult was born on December 7, 1989 in Wokingham, Berkshire, England, UK as Nicholas Caradoc Hoult. His parents are Glenis Hoult, a piano teacher and Roger Hoult, a pilot. He has three siblings, two sisters and one brother. His great-aunt was one of the most popular actresses of her time, Dame Anna Neagle. He attended Sylvia Young Theatre School, a school for performing arts, to start acting as a career.

His breakthrough role was as a child when he starred as Marcus Brewer in About a Boy (2002), alongside Hugh Grant. In 2005, he starred in his first American film The Weather Man (2005) as Nicolas Cage's son. At age 17, he received recognition for starring as Tony Stonem in the BAFTAs-awarded British teen-drama series Skins (2007). Later he played the role of Kenny Potter in the Oscar-nominated film A Single Man (2009) after being discovered by director Tom Ford.

Hoult was cast as Hank / Beast in the X-Men franchise and starred in the films X-Men: First Class (2011), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) and X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019).

He also starred as "R" in the romance / horror zombie film Warm Bodies (2013), Jack in Jack the Giant Slayer (2013), Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and British novelist J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings, in the biographical film Tolkien (2019).

The iconoclastic gifts of the highly striking and ferociously talented actress Tilda Swinton have been appreciated by art house crowds and international audiences alike. After her stunning Oscar-winning turn as a high-powered corporate attorney in the George Clooney starring and critically lauded legal thriller Michael Clayton (2007), however, her androgynous looks and often bizarre appeal have been embraced by more mainstream crowds as well.

She was born Katherine Mathilda Swinton into a patrician Scottish military family on November 5, 1960, in London, England. Her mother, Judith Balfour, Lady Swinton (née Killen), was Australian, and her father, Major-General Sir John Swinton, an army officer, was English-born. Her ancestry is Scottish, Northern Irish, and English, including a long tapestry of prominent Scottish ancestors. Educated at an English and a Scottish boarding school, Tilda subsequently studied Social and Political Science at Cambridge University and graduated in 1983 with a degree in English Literature.

During her tenure as a student, she performed countless stage productions and proceeded to work for a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company where she appeared in such productions as "Measure for Measure." The rebel insider her, however, was strong and she left the company after a year as her approach and interests began to shift dramatically. With a pungent taste for the unique and seldom tried, Tilda found some gender-bending stage roles come her way. She portrayed Mozart in Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri", and as a working class woman impersonating her dead husband during World War II, in Manfred Karge's "Man to Man," a role she later committed to film (Man to Man (1992)).

In 1985, the tall, slender performer with alabaster skin and carrot-topped hair began a professional association with gay experimental director Derek Jarman. She continued to live and work with the groundbreaking writer/director/cinematographer for the next nine years, involving herself in seven of his often notorious films. This quirky, highly fascinating alliance would produce such stark and radical turns as the Berlin International Film Festival winners Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), The Garden (1990) and Edward II (1991) (playing Isabella, in which she won "Best Actress" at the Venice Film Festival) and Wittgenstein (1993), as well as the films Soursweet (1988) (a movie with no spoken dialogue) and the Stockholm Film Festival Award winner Blue (1993).

Jarman succumbed to complications from AIDS in 1994. His untimely demise left a devastating void in Tilda's life for quite some time. Her most notable performance of her Jarman period, however, came from a non-Jarman film. For the vivid title role in Orlando (1992), her nobleman character lives for 400 years while changing sex from man to woman. The film, which Swinton spent years helping writer/director Sally Potter develop and finance, continues to this day to have a worldwide devoted fan following.

Over the years, Tilda has preferred art to celebrity, opening herself to experimental projects with new and untried directors and mediums, delving into the worlds of installation art and cutting-edge fashion. Consistently off-centered roles in Female Perversions (1996), Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), Teknolust (2002), Young Adam (2003), Broken Flowers (2005) and Béla Tarr's The Man from London (2007) have added to her mystique. Back in 1995, she delved into a performance art piece in the Serpentine Gallery, London, where she was put on display to the public for a week, asleep (or apparently so), in a glass case.

Following the birth of her twins in 1997, Tilda would leave lean for a time towards Hollywood mainstream filming. The thriller The Deep End (2001), earned her a number of critic's awards and her first Golden Globe nomination. Other visible U.S. pictures included The Beach (2000) with Leonardo DiCaprio, fantasy epic Constantine (2005) with Keanu Reeves, her Oscar-decorated performance in Michael Clayton (2007) and, of course, her iconic White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005).

Into the millennium, Tilda continued to amaze starring in the crime drama Julia (2008) and in David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). She learned Italian and Russian for Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love (2009), starred in the psychological thriller We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and Bong Joon Ho's Snowpiercer (2013), and earned fine notice in Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem (2013). She also starred in the dark romantic fantasy drama Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) directed by Jim Jarmusch, had a small role in Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), starred in Judd Apatow's comedy Trainwreck (2015), and played a rock star in Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash (2015).

Showing no signs of slowing up, Tilda continues to make creative, visual impressions in such films as the Coen Brothers' Hail, Caesar! (2016) where she reunited with Clooney and had a dual role playing twin journalists, and as the wise Asian teacher of Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) in the Marvel Comics action film Doctor Strange (2016), while repeating the part of The Ancient One in Avengers: Endgame (2019). She gave another eccentric, unhinged performance in the action adventure message movie Okja (2017), played Betsy Trotwood in a contemporary telling of The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) and teamed up again with writer/director Jim Jarmusch in the thoroughly offbeat fantasy horror comedy The Dead Don't Die (2019).

Stephen Graham was raised in the small town of Kirkby, Lancashire, to a pediatric nurse mother and a social worker step-father. His biological father was of Jamaican and Swedish descent. After years of small parts, he finally got his big break in an unexpected way, playing the dim-witted Tommy in Guy Ritchie's film, Snatch (2000). Apparently, Graham didn't audition for the role as Tommy--one day, he accompanied a friend to the audition for Ritchie and was asked if he was next. When Graham replied "no", Ritchie told the then-unknown actor, "I like your face", and was asked if he could start work Monday.

So much is to be said of this actor, who started his career with bit parts on ITV (he played Lee Sankey on Coronation Street (2006) in 1999 and was also cast in smaller films like Pit Fighter (2005). Graham also appeared in the critically acclaimed Gangs of New York (2002), directed by Martin Scorsese, and on television, playing Sgt. Myron 'Mike' Ranney in the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers (2001). His acting course also includes brilliant performances in excellent works such as in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Parade's End (2012) and Taboo (2017).

Kit Harington was born Christopher Catesby Harington in Acton, London, to Deborah Jane (Catesby), a former playwright, and David Richard Harington, a businessman. His mother named him after 16th-century British playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe, whose first name was shortened to Kit, a name Harington prefers. Harington's uncle is Sir Nicholas John Harington, the 14th Baronet Harington, and his paternal great-grandfather was Sir Richard Harington, the 12th Baronet Harington. Through his paternal grandmother, Lavender Cecilia Denny, Kit's eight times great-grandfather was King Charles II of England. Also through his father, Harington descends from politician Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, the bacon merchant T. A. Denny, clergyman Baptist Wriothesley Noel, merchant and politician Peter Baillie, peer William Legge, 4th Earl of Dartmouth, and MP Sir William Molesworth, 6th Baronet.

Harington was a pupil at the Southfield Primary School from 1992 to 1998. When he was 11, his family moved to Worcestershire, and he studied at the Chantry High School in Martley until 2003. He became interested in acting after watching a production of Waiting for Godot when he was 14, and he performed in several school productions. He attended Worcester Sixth Form College, where he studied Drama and Theatre Studies, between 2003 and 2005. When he was 17, he was inspired to study acting in a drama school after watching a performance by Ben Whishaw playing Hamlet in 2004. He moved back to London when he was eighteen and a year later attended the Central School of Speech and Drama, from which he graduated in 2008.

Kingsley Ben-Adir was born on 20 November 1986. He is an actor, known for The OA (2016), High Fidelity (2020) and Peaky Blinders (2013).

Nick Frost is an English actor, screenwriter and comedian. He is known for his work in the series of British comedic genre films The Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy: Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007) and The World's End (2013). He also co-starred in Paul (2011), with frequent collaborator and friend Simon Pegg.

Nicholas John "Nick" Frost is good friends with Simon Pegg and they have appeared alongside each other in several Movies. He resides with his half-Swedish wife, production executive Christina Frostin St Margarets, London. He previously lived in Finsbury Park, which was also the filming location for Shaun of the Dead. In a 2005 interview, Frost stated that he was brought up as a Catholic. He is a supporter of West Ham United, as well as being a rugby player, formerly playing for Barking RFC. On 22 June 2011, Frost's wife gave birth to a son.

Phoebe Mary Waller-Bridge is an English actress, producer, and writer. She created, wrote, and starred in the Channel 4 sitcom Crashing (2016) and the BBC comedy-drama series Fleabag (2016-2019). She was also the show-runner and executive producer for the first series of the BBC America thriller series Killing Eve (2018).

For Fleabag, she received the British Academy Television Award for Best Female Comedy Performance, as well as three Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, and Outstanding Comedy Series. Both Fleabag and Killing Eve have been named among the greatest television series of the 21st century by The Guardian.

Waller-Bridge starred in the comedy series The Café (2011-2013) and the crime drama series Broadchurch (2015). She also appeared in films, including Albert Nobbs (2011), The Iron Lady (2011), and Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017), and played the droid L3-37 in the Star Wars anthology prequel Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018). She co-wrote the screenplay for the 25th James Bond film, titled No Time to Die (2020).

Phoebe Mary Waller-Bridge was born to Theresa Mary (née Clerke) and Michael Cyprian Waller-Bridge. Her father founded the electronic trading platform Tradepoint, while her mother works for the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers. The Waller-Bridge family were landed gentry of Cuckfield, Sussex. On her father's side, she is also a descendant of The Rev. Sir Egerton Leigh, 2nd Baronet, Conservative MP for Mid Cheshire from 1873 to his death in 1876. Her maternal grandfather was Sir John Edward Longueville Clerke, 12th baronet, of Hitcham, Buckinghamshire. Waller-Bridge grew up in Ealing, London, and has a younger brother named Jasper, a music manager, and an older sister named Isobel Waller-Bridge, a composer who wrote the music for Fleabag. Her parents are divorced. She was educated at St Augustine's Priory, a Catholic independent school for girls, followed by the independent sixth form college DLD College London in Marylebone, London. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

Dame Harriet Mary Walter DBE is a British actress. She has received a Laurence Olivier Award as well as numerous nominations including for a Tony Award, three Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. In 2011, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to drama.

With his breakthrough performance as Eames in Christopher Nolan's sci-fi thriller Inception (2010), English actor Tom Hardy has been brought to the attention of mainstream audiences worldwide. However, the versatile actor has been steadily working on both stage and screen since his television debut in the miniseries Band of Brothers (2001). After being cast in the World War II drama, Hardy left his studies at the prestigious Drama Centre in London and was subsequently cast as Twombly in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (2001) and as the villain Shinzon in Star Trek: Nemesis (2002).

Edward Thomas Hardy was born on September 15, 1977 in Hammersmith, London; his mother, Elizabeth Anne (Barrett), is an artist and painter, and his father, Chips Hardy, is a writer. He is of English and Irish descent. Hardy was brought up in East Sheen, London, and first studied at Reed's School. His education continued at Tower House School, then at Richmond Drama School, and subsequently at the Drama Centre London, along with fellow Oscar nominee Michael Fassbender. After winning a modeling competition at age 21, he had a brief contract with the agency Models One.

Tom spent his teens and early twenties battling delinquency, alcoholism and drug addiction; after completing his work on Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), he sought treatment and has also admitted that his battles with addiction ended his five-year marriage to Sarah Ward. Returning to work in 2003, Hardy was awarded the Evening Standard Most Promising Newcomer Award for his theatre performances in the productions of "In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings" and "Blood". In 2003, Tom also co-starred in the play "The Modernists" with Paul Popplewell, Jesse Spencer and Orlando Wells.

During the next five years, Hardy worked consistently in film, television and theatre, playing roles as varied as Robert Dudley in the BBC's The Virgin Queen (2005), Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist (2007) and starring in "The Man of Mode" at the National Theatre. On the silver screen, he appeared in the crime thriller Layer Cake (2004) with Daniel Craig, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006), and the romp Scenes of a Sexual Nature (2006).

In 2006, Hardy created "Shotgun", an underground theatre company along with director Robert Delamere, and directed a play, penned by his father for the company, called "Blue on Blue". In 2007, Hardy received a best actor BAFTA nomination for his touching performance as Stuart Shorter in the BBC adaptation of Alexander Masters' bestselling biography Stuart: A Life Backwards (2007). Hailed for his transformative character acting, Hardy was lauded for his emotionally and physically convincing portrayal in the ill-fated and warmhearted tale of Shorter, a homeless and occasionally violent man suffering from addiction and muscular dystrophy.

The following year, he appeared as gay hoodlum Handsome Bob in the Guy Ritchie film RocknRolla (2008), but this would be his next transformation that would prove his extensive range and stun critics. In the film Bronson (2008), Hardy played the notorious Charles Bronson (given name, Michael Peterson), the "most violent prisoner in Britain". Bald, pumped-up, and outfitted with Bronson's signature strongman mustache, Hardy is unrecognizable and gives a harrowing performance that is physically fearless and psychologically unsettling. Director Nicolas Winding Refn breaks the fourth wall with Hardy retelling his tales directly to viewers as well as performing them outright before an audience of his own imagining. The performance mixes terrifying brutality, vaudevillian showmanship, wry humor, and an alarming amount of commitment, and won Hardy a British Independent Film Award for Best Actor. The performance got Hollywood's attention, and in 2009, Hardy was named one of Variety's "10 Actors to Watch". That year, he continued to garner praise for his starring role in The Take (2009), a four-part adaptation of Martina Cole's bestselling crime novel, as well as for his performance as Heathcliff in a version of Wuthering Heights (2009).

Recent work includes the aforementioned breakthrough appearance in Inception (2010) alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Ken Watanabe, Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard and Elliot Page. The movie was released in July 2010 and became one of top 25 highest grossing films of all time, collecting eight Oscar nominations (including Best Picture) and winning four.

Other films include Warrior (2011), opposite Joel Edgerton, the story of two estranged brothers facing the fight of a lifetime from director Gavin O'Connor, and This Means War (2012), directed by McG and co-starring Reese Witherspoon and Chris Pine. Tom also starred in the heralded Cold War thriller, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) with Colin Firth and Gary Oldman. Hardy rejoined Christopher Nolan for The Dark Knight Rises (2012); he played the villain role of Bane opposite Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Gary Oldman. Hardy's menacing physique and his character's scrambled, hard-to-distinguish voice became a major discussion point as the film was released.

Outside of performing, Hardy is the patron for the charity "Flack", which is an organization to aid the recovery of the homeless in Cambridge. And in 2010, Hardy was named an Ambassador for The Prince's Trust, which helps disadvantaged youth. On the recent stage, he starred in the Brett C. Leonard play "The Long Red Road" in early 2010. Written for Hardy and directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, the play was staged at Chicago's Goodman Theater.

In 2015, Hardy starred as the iconic Mad Max in George Miller's reboot of his franchise, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). He also collected a British Independent Film Award for his portrayal of both the Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie, in Legend (2015), and an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role as John Fitzgerald in The Revenant (2015). Hardy also starred on the BBC series Peaky Blinders (2013), alongside Cillian Murphy, and on the television series Taboo (2017), both created by Steven Knight.

He has an outlaw biker story among other projects in development. In 2010, Hardy became engaged to fellow English actress Charlotte Riley, whom he starred with in The Take (2009) and Wuthering Heights (2009), and is raising a young son, Louis Thomas Hardy, with ex-girlfriend Rachael Speed. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire at the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours for his services to drama.

English actor, writer, and comedian Simon Pegg was born Simon John Beckingham in Brockworth, Gloucestershire, to Gillian Rosemary (Smith), a civil servant, and John Henry Beckingham, a jazz musician. His parents divorced when he was seven. He later took his stepfather's surname "Pegg." He was educated at Brockworth Comprehensive Secondary School in Gloucestershire and went on to Stratford-upon-Avon College to study English literature and performance studies. He then attended the University of Bristol, and earned a bachelor's degree in drama. In the early 2000s, Pegg moved to London and began forging a successful career in stand-up comedy. Television opportunities followed including roles in Six Pairs of Pants (1995), Asylum (1996), and We Know Where You Live (1997). In 1999, Pegg and Jessica Hynes teamed up to write and star in cult sitcom Spaced (1999), directed by Edgar Wright. The series also featured Pegg's best friend Nick Frost. Pegg's breakthrough in film came with the zom-rom-com Shaun of the Dead (2004), which he also co-wrote with director Edgar Wright. Again, the film featured Nick Frost. The trio also scored a hit with police comedy Hot Fuzz (2007). Further film successes followed for Pegg, notably in the iconic role of Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in Star Trek (2009) and alongside Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible III (2006) and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011).

Jamie Demetriou is one of the UK's leading comedy actors, writer-performers and character comedians.

His hit debut six-part series STATH LETS FLATS, which he wrote and stars in as the titular character, aired on Channel 4 in 2018 to critical acclaim. The series holds a 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Jamie will start filming the second series of the show in May 2019. He was recently nominated for an RTS Award for Best Writer (Comedy) for the series (he wrote 3 episodes with Robert Popper and 3 alone) and earlier this year was nominated for a Broadcast Award for Best Comedy Programme.

He is currently writing, and will star in, PARIAHS - a 6 x 10' series - with Ellie White for BBC3, following a successful set of tasters that were broadcast on iPlayer.

Jamie has also had a feature film script commissioned by Film4 and he wrote and starred in his own Sky Halloween Comedy Short, OH GOD, in 2016.

As an actor, Jamie voiced Moriarty, opposite Johnny Depp's Sherlock, in Paramount's animation feature film SHERLOCK GNOMES. He also played the lead villain Mr Ahmad in the Netflix global-release feature GAME OVER, MAN! alongside the Workaholics team of Anders Holm, Adam Devine and Blake Anderson and from producers Seth Rogen and Scott Rudin.

Jamie played The Professor in Working Title's smash hit, PADDINGTON 2, and can soon be seen in the role of Dimidius in HORRIBLE HISTORIES: THE MOVIE - ROTTEN ROMANS.

Jamie can soon be seen in a regular role in Hulu / MGM's FOUR WEDDINGS reboot.

Other recent television roles include Steve Coogan's THIS TIME WITH ALAN PARTRIDGE for BBC One, Julia Davis' hit series for Sky and HBO, SALLY 4EVER, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge's phenomenon, FLEABAG, for the BBC.

Jamie Dornan was born on 1 May 1982 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK. He is an actor and producer, known for Belfast (2021), The Fall (2013) and Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021). He has been married to Amelia Warner since 27 April 2013. They have three children.

Martin Freeman is an English actor, known for portraying Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit film trilogy, Tim Canterbury in the original UK version of sitcom mockumentary The Office (2001), Dr. John Watson in the British crime drama Sherlock (2010) and Lester Nygaard in the dark comedy-crime drama TV series Fargo (2014).

His other notable film roles include the romantic comedy Love Actually (2003) and the comic science fiction film The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005).

Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch was born and raised in London, England. His parents, Wanda Ventham and Timothy Carlton (born Timothy Carlton Congdon Cumberbatch), are both actors. He is a grandson of submarine commander Henry Carlton Cumberbatch, and a great-grandson of diplomat Henry Arnold Cumberbatch CMG. Cumberbatch attended Brambletye School and Harrow School. Whilst at Harrow, he had an arts scholarship and painted large oil canvases. It's also where he began acting. After he finished school, he took a year off to volunteer as an English teacher in a Tibetan monastery in Darjeeling, India. On his return, he studied drama at Manchester University. He continued his training as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art graduating with an M.A. in Classical Acting. By the time he had completed his studies, he already had an agent.

Cumberbatch has worked in theatre, television, film and radio. His breakthrough on the big screen came in 2004 when he portrayed Stephen Hawking in the television movie Hawking (2004). In 2010, he became a household name as Sherlock Holmes on the British television series Sherlock (2010). In 2011, he appeared in two Oscar-nominated films - War Horse (2011) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). He followed this with acclaimed roles in the science fiction film Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), the Oscar-winning drama 12 Years a Slave (2013), The Fifth Estate (2013) and August: Osage County (2013). In 2014, he portrayed Alan Turing in The Imitation Game (2014) which earned him a Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild Award, British Academy of Film and Television Arts and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

Cumberbatch was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in the 2015 Birthday Honours for his services to the performing arts and to charity.

Cumberbatch's engagement to theatre and opera director Sophie Hunter, whom he has known for 17 years, was announced in the "Forthcoming Marriages" section of The Times newspaper on November 5, 2014. On February 14, 2015, the couple married at the 12th century Church of St. Peter and St. Paul on the Isle of Wight followed by a reception at Mottistone Manor. They have three sons, Christopher Carlton (born 2015), Hal Auden (born 2017), and Finn (born 2019).

Sharon Lorencia Horgan is an Irish actress, writer, director, comedian and producer. She is best known for the comedy series Pulling (2006-2009) and Catastrophe (2015-2019), both of which she starred in and co-wrote. She also created the HBO comedy series Divorce (2016-2019).

Horgan won the 2008 British Comedy Award for Best TV Actress for Pulling, while the show's 2009 hour-long final episode won the British Comedy Award for Best Comedy Drama. A seven-time BAFTA TV Award nominee, she won the 2016 BAFTA TV Award for Best Comedy Writer for Catastrophe (with Rob Delaney). Catastrophe was also nominated for Scripted Comedy in the 2020 BAFTA TV Awards and for the 2016 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. She has also won five Irish Film and Television Awards in both acting and writing for her work on Catastrophe. Horgan also won the 2021 Irish Film and Television Award in the category of Actress in a Supporting Role for her performance in Dating Amber (2020).

Horgan has appeared in the films Valiant (2005), Imagine Me & You (2005), Man Up (2015), and Game Night (2018), Military Wives (2019), Dating Amber (2020), and BBC Two film Together (2021).

English film actor, director and author Andy Serkis is known for his performance capture roles comprising motion capture acting, animation and voice work for such computer-generated characters as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001-2003) and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), the eponymous King Kong in the 2005 film, Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), Captain Haddock / Sir Francis Haddock in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin (2011) and Supreme Leader Snoke in Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015). Serkis earned a Golden Globe Award nomination for his portrayal of serial killer Ian Brady in the British television film Longford (2006), and was nominated for a BAFTA Award for his portrayal of new wave and punk rock musician Ian Dury in the biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010). In 2015, he had a small role in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). Serkis has his own motion capture workshop, The Imaginarium Studios in London, which he will use for his directorial debut, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (2018).

Andrew Clement G. Serkis was born April 20, 1964, in Ruislip Manor, West London, England. He has three sisters and a brother. His father, Clement Serkis, an ethnic Armenian whose original family surname was Serkissian, was a medical doctor working abroad, in Iraq; the Serkis family spent time around the Middle East, and for the first ten years of his life, Andy traveled between Baghdad and London. His mother, Lylie (Weech), who is British-born, was busy working as a special education teacher of handicapped children, so Andy and his four siblings were raised with au pairs in the house. Young Serkis wanted to be an artist; he was fond of painting and drawing, and visualized himself working behind the scenes. He attended St. Benedict's School, a Roman Catholic School for boys at the Benedictine Abbey in London. Serkis studied visual arts at Lancaster University in the north-west of England. There, he became involved in mechanical aspects of the theatre and did stage design and set building for theatrical productions. Then, Serkis was asked to play a role in a student production, and made his stage debut in Barrie Keeffe's play, "Gotcha"; thereafter, he switched from stage design to acting, which was a real calling that transformed his life.

Instead of going to an acting college, Serkis, in 1985, began his professional acting career at the Duke's Playhouse in Lancaster, where he was given an Equity card and performed in fourteen plays, one after another, as an apprentice of Jonathan Petherbridge. After that, he worked in touring theatre companies, doing it for no money, fueled by a sense of enthusiasm, moving to a new town every week. He has thus appeared in a host of popular plays and on almost every renowned British stage. In 1989, he appeared in a stage production of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth", so beginning his long association with the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, where he would return many times, to appear in "She Stoops to Conquer", "Your Home in the West" and the "True Nature of Love", among other plays. In the 1990s, Serkis began to make his mark on the London stage, appearing at the Royal Court Theatre as "The Fool" in "King Lear", making his interpretation of "The Fool" as the woman that "Lear", a widower, could relate to - a man, in drag, as a Victorian musician. He also appeared as "Potts" in the hit play, "Mojo", playing in front of full houses and earning huge critical success. In 1987, Serkis made his debut on television, and he acted in several major British TV miniseries throughout the 1990s.

In 1999, Andy Serkis landed the prize role of "Gollum" in Peter Jackson's epic film trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien's saga, "The Lord of the Rings". He spent four years in the part and received awards and nominations for his performance as "Gollum", a computer-generated character in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), which won 11 Oscars. "Gollum" was the collaborative team's effort around Serkis's work in performance capture - an art form based on CGI-assisted acting. Serkis's work was an interactive performance in a skin-tight CGI suit with markers allowing cameras to track and register 3D position for each marker. Serkis' every nuance was picked up by several cameras positioned at precisely calculated angles to allow for the software to see enough information to process the image. The images of Serkis' performances were translated into the digital format by animators at Weta Digital studio in New Zealand. There, his image was key-frame animated and then edited into the movie, Serkis did have one scene in "The Return of the King" showing how he originally had the ring, killing another hobbit to posses it after they found it during a fishing trip. He drew from his three cats clearing fur balls out of their throats to develop the constricted voice he produced for "Gollum" and "Sméagol", and it was also enhanced by sound editing in post-production.

Serkis spent almost two years in New Zealand and away from his family, and much of 2002 and 2003 in post-production studios for large periods of time, due to complexity of the creative process of bringing the character of "Gollum" to the screen. Serkis had to shoot two versions for every scene; one version was with him on camera, acting with (chiefly) Elijah Wood and Sean Astin, which served both to show Wood and Astin the moves so that they could precisely interact with the movements of "Gollum", and to provide the CGI artists the subtleties of Gollum's physical movements and facial expressions for their manual finishing of the animated images. In the other version, he'd go the voice off-camera, as Wood and Astin repeated their movements as though "Gollum" were there with them; that take would be the basis for inserting the CGI Gollum used in the released movie. In post-production, Serkis was doing motion-capture wearing a skintight motion capture suit with CGI gear while acting as a virtual puppeteer redoing every single scene in the studio. Additional CGI rotomation was done by animators using the human eye instead of the computer to capture the subtleties of Serkis' performance. Serkis also used this art form in his performance as "Kong" in King Kong (2005), which won him a Toronto Film Critics Association Award (2005) for his unprecedented work helping to realize the main character in "King Kong", and a Visual Effects Society Award (2006) for Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Motion Picture.

Apart from his line of CGI-driven characters, Serkis continued with traditional acting in several leading and supporting roles, such as his appearances as "Richard Kneeland" opposite Jennifer Garner in 13 Going on 30 (2004), and "Alley" opposite David Bowie in The Prestige (2006), among other film performances. On television, he starred as 'Vincent Van Gogh' in the sixth episode of Power of Art (2006), the BBC2 series about artists. Serkis is billed as "Capricorn" in the upcoming adventure film, Inkheart (2008). At the same time, he continued the development of performance capture while expanding his career into computer games. He starred as "King Bothan" in the martial arts drama, Heavenly Sword (2007), a Playstation 3 title, for which he provided a basis for his in-game face and also acts as a dramatic director on the project.

Andy Serkis married actress and singer Lorraine Ashbourne, and the couple have three children: daughter Ruby Serkis (born in 1998), and two sons Sonny Serkis (born in 2000) and Louis Ashbourne Serkis (born on 19 June 2004), who is now also a movie star. Away from acting, Andy Serkis is an accomplished amateur painter. Since his school years at Lancaster, being so close to the Lake District, Serkis developed his other passion in life: mountaineering. He is a pescetarian. Serkis has been active in charitable causes, such as The Hope Foundation, which provides essential life-saving medical aid for children suffering from Leukemia and children from countries devastated by war. In October 2006, he was a presenter at the first annual British Academy Video Games Awards at the Roundhouse, London. Andy Serkis lives with his family in North London, England.