Fabien Frankel
Fabien Frankel is an actor, born 1994.
Fabien Frankel lost his father, the actor Mark Frankel, in a road accident when he was two. He and his younger brother were raised in London by their mother, a composer, speaking French at home and going to the cinema once a week, and he trained first on a foundation course at RADA and then at LAMDA, graduating in 2017.
The break came fast, and it was a harder assignment than it looked. After a supporting role in The Serpent he was cast as Ser Criston Cole in House of the Dragon, a low-born knight promoted into a court that will never regard him as an equal. The part only works if the actor can play wounded pride as though it were principle, understanding the difference while the character does not. Frankel plays him tightly wound and faintly ridiculous, which is a braver reading than straightforward villainy and has made him one of the most argued-about presences on the show.
He followed it with Anthony Grasso in Task and a part in the 2025 film The Actor. The record is still four screen credits long, and he has yet to carry anything himself, so almost everything interesting about him is still ahead.
Movies (1)
TV (3)
Where to start with Fabien Frankel
Watch House of the Dragon, and watch the Criston Cole scenes closely, because almost every decision that character makes is driven by embarrassment and Frankel keeps finding fresh ways to play a man who cannot admit it.
The Serpent is the useful next step, a smaller and much more passive part in a very good true-crime series, worth seeing mainly to measure how little he had to work with a year earlier. Task gives him something firmer to hold, and The Actor is the sole film credit here and the least representative of what he does well. Four credits is not much of a route, so the honest advice is to watch the dragon show and check back in a few years.