David Jonsson
David Jonsson is an actor, born 1993.
Jonsson started on stage in the West End and won a Black British Theatre Award for the play and breathe... in 2021. On screen, television came first, with Cromwell Ames in an Endeavour case and Isaac Turner in Deep State, before Industry handed him Gus Sackey and something worth watching.
Gus is the role that showed what he can do. In a series about young people performing confidence on a trading floor, Jonsson plays the one who is genuinely watching, and he lets you see the calculation happen half a second before the line. That control carried into the films. In Rye Lane, in 2023, he plays heartbreak as comic deflation, the wounded party in a South London romance that moves faster than he does. In Alien: Romulus the year after he takes the most technically demanding part in the picture, a synthetic whose speech patterns have to shift under the audience without ever announcing it. In The Long Walk, in 2025, he is Peter McVries, the decent one inside an unbearable premise.
He has the BAFTA Rising Star Award, which is usually a prediction rather than a reward, and in his case the prediction looks safe. Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin gave him Frank Fisher in 2024, and Wasteman is due in 2026. The interesting thing about the run so far is how little of it repeats.
Movies (5)
TV (3)
Where to start with David Jonsson
Rye Lane is the easiest recommendation on this page: a fast, generous, very South London romantic comedy, and Jonsson is funny in it in a way none of the rest of his work has asked him to be.
For the serious case, Industry is the long form. Gus is the character with the most going on and the least said about it, and the series is at its best when it lets him be quietly furious in a room full of noise.
Then the two big genre swings. Alien: Romulus asks the hardest performance in the film of him and is warmer for it, while The Long Walk is a bleak Stephen King adaptation that runs on the decency of his character. Endeavour and Deep State are the early television, and Wasteman is next.