Andrew Lincoln

Andrew Lincoln, born Andrew Clutterbuck, came up through the exact British television pipeline of his generation. Drop the Dead Donkey in 1990, then Egg in This Life from 1996, then Simon Casey in Teachers from 2001: the decent, slightly hangdog Englishman, good at looking hurt. Love Actually in 2003 fixed that image internationally with a doorstep scene played almost entirely in silence, holding a stack of cards.

Then he moved to Georgia and spent most of a decade being someone else. Rick Grimes on The Walking Dead, from 2010, required an American accent held for years on end, a physical change from lean to wrecked, and a slow drift out of decency into something the audience was not always supposed to like, which is the most interesting thing the series ever did with him. He has a Saturn Award for best actor on television. He returned to the character in 2024 for The Ones Who Live, a short series built around him.

The film work sits on either side of that. Human Traffic in 1999 and Gangster No. 1 in 2000 are the sharp young British credits and are better than his reputation suggests. Enduring Love in 2004 and Made in Dagenham in 2010 are respectable middle. Penguin Bloom in 2021, playing Cameron Bloom, is the closest he has come to a grown-up lead on film, and Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities gave him a good hour of horror in 2022. Coldwater arrived in 2025.