Jacob Anderson
Jacob Anderson is an actor, born 1990.
Jacob Anderson (born 1990) was working steadily in British film and television from 2010, in Chatroom, Injustice and the comedy Episodes, before Game of Thrones cast him as Grey Worm and kept him from 2013 to 2019. It was a strange job for a young actor: a soldier written with almost no interiority, performed in a second language, mostly required to stand still and mean it.
The Anne Rice adaptation Interview with the Vampire is the opposite assignment and the reason his profile changed. As Louis de Pointe du Lac he has to carry the story as its narrator, which means talking constantly, remembering selectively, and letting the audience notice the difference between the two. He continues in the follow-up series The Vampire Lestat.
Music runs alongside all of it. Anderson records as Raleigh Ritchie, releasing the soul and trip hop album You're a Man Now, Boy in 2016 to positive reviews and Andy in 2020. The two careers are less separate than they look. Both of his best known screen roles are men whose composure is a performance, and he has spent a decade writing about roughly the same thing.
Movies (9)
TV (6)
Where to start with Jacob Anderson
Interview with the Vampire is the one to start with and the one that makes the case for him. Louis keeps rearranging his own account, and Anderson plays the gap between the telling and the events with a control the earlier work never asked for. It is also the best looking cable drama of its stretch. The story carries on in The Vampire Lestat.
Game of Thrones is where most people know him from, and Grey Worm is worth watching as a technical exercise: a whole person built out of posture and a constructed accent. After that the pickings thin. Overlord is a solid wartime horror picture, Doctor Who gives him a decent run as Vinder, and Episodes is a reminder that he started in comedy.