Alex Lawther
Alex Lawther is an actor, born 1995.
Alex Lawther (born 1995) started on stage, originating the role of John Blakemore in David Hare's South Downs, and made his film debut as the young Alan Turing in The Imitation Game (2014). It is a handful of school scenes, and it won him the London Film Critics' Circle award for Young British Performer of the Year and a place on BAFTA's 2015 Breakthrough Brits list.
What he has traded on since is a particular kind of unnerving intelligence. Lawther is small, precise and slightly wrong in a way directors find useful, and he is very good at playing people whose inner life is running considerably faster than the conversation in front of them. The lead in The End of the F***ing World is the clearest case, a teenager narrating his own detachment in flat voiceover while the show quietly disagrees with him. King Charles VI in The Last Duel and Morisot in The French Dispatch put the same quality into single scenes.
He works in French as well as English, in The Translators and The Lost Patient, which is unusual for a British actor of his generation and has given him a career that does not depend on London casting. Recent work has leaned into genre: Nemik in Andor, and a role in Alien: Earth. He writes and directs too.
Movies (12)
TV (5)
Where to start with Alex Lawther
The End of the F***ing World is the starting point and the best use anyone has made of him: two series of road-movie deadpan that keep undercutting their own narration, with a lead performance that stays sympathetic while doing very little to earn it. Watch it before anything else.
The Imitation Game is the calling card, and it is a supporting part, so it does not take long to get to. After that, The Last Duel and The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun are the two big-director cameos, both worth it, both over quickly. The Translators is the French thriller and the most fun of his continental work. Andor hands him the best written small part in modern Star Wars, Alien: Earth is the current job, and Ghost Stories is the horror outlier for anyone who wants one.