Frank Dillane
Frank Dillane is an actor, born 1991.
Frank Dillane's first widely seen performance was brief: the sixteen year old Tom Riddle in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a part that required him to be charming and wrong at the same time, and which he got right enough that it followed him for years afterwards. An older credit sits further down his list, a child part in Welcome to Sarajevo in 1997, when he would have been about six.
Fear the Walking Dead gave him the longer test. As Nick Clark from 2015 to 2018 he played a young man already living outside the rules before the world ended, and the performance was the strangest thing in the series: loose limbed, unpredictable, apparently improvising through scenes the writing kept trying to formalise. It made Nick the only genuinely unsettling presence on a show otherwise assembled from types.
Since then he has worked mostly in British television and small films, which suits him. He is Dr. Luke Garrett in The Essex Serpent, Charles Devereux in Renegade Nell, Boisie Hannington in Joan, Tony Rich in How to Build a Girl, Owen Coffin in In the Heart of the Sea, with recent film work in Urchin and Harvest. He is a musician as well. The consistent thread is a preference for characters who are slightly off balance, and a flat refusal to smooth them out for anyone's comfort.
Movies (6)
TV (6)
Where to start with Frank Dillane
Fear the Walking Dead is the obvious start and holds up better than its reputation, at least across the early seasons, which are the ones with Dillane in them. Nick is the reason to watch, a character the series never fully controls, played by an actor who seems to be making different choices from everyone else on set.
The Essex Serpent is the more grown up recommendation, a period piece with real ideas in it and a doctor's part that gives him something to push against. In the Heart of the Sea is the big studio outing, handsome and airless. Renegade Nell and Joan are the recent British television, both better than their marketing. Sense8 and How to Build a Girl are small parts, worth it only if you are working through the list.