Jeremy Northam
Jeremy Northam is an actor, born 1961.
Jeremy Northam has spent thirty years playing men who are impeccably turned out and not entirely trustworthy. That is a narrower skill than it sounds, and he is very good at it. Born in Cambridge in 1961, he arrived on both sides of the Atlantic at once: a Hollywood thriller in 1995, Mr Knightley in Emma the year after.
Literary adaptation is his natural habitat, and the list reads like a syllabus. Knightley for Austen, Sir Robert Chiltern in An Ideal Husband for Wilde, Hindley Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights for Bronte, Prince Amerigo in The Golden Bowl for Henry James, Randolph Henry Ash in Possession for A. S. Byatt. Running alongside it is a second specialism, real people: Ivor Novello in Gosford Park, Sir Thomas More in The Tudors, Anthony Eden in The Crown, Bertrand Russell in The Man Who Knew Infinity. He plays them without the usual impersonation tics, which is presumably why he keeps being asked.
What keeps the career from being a costume drawer is the genre work. He is in Mimic and The Invasion, and in Cypher he carries a low budget science fiction picture that is stranger and better than its money. The later parts have grown smaller and more official: Ken MacDonald in Official Secrets, Brian Woodale in Eye in the Sky, Ernest Jones in Freud's Last Session. He has become the actor a British film hires when a scene needs someone who sounds like the establishment and might be about to lie to you.
Movies (27)
- The Net (1995)
- Wuthering Heights (1992)
- The Invasion (2007)
- Eye in the Sky (2015)
- Official Secrets (2019)
- The Man Who Knew Infinity (2016)
- Mimic (1997)
- Gosford Park (2001)
- Emma (1996)
- Freud's Last Session (2023)
- Enigma (2001)
- Our Kind of Traitor (2016)
- Cypher (2002)
- Gloria (1999)
- Possession (2002)
- Creation (2009)
- An Ideal Husband (1999)
- Glorious 39 (2009)
- The Singing Detective (2003)
- A Cock and Bull Story (2005)
- Guy X (2005)
- Amistad (1997)
- Happy, Texas (1999)
- The Statement (2003)
- The Golden Bowl (2000)
- Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius (2004)
- Dean Spanley (2008)
TV (5)
Where to start with Jeremy Northam
Everything he does fits inside one frame of Gosford Park, so start there: he plays Ivor Novello, a real composer and screen star dropped among fictional guests, and the performance is all surface control. From there, Emma for the Austen version of that manner and An Ideal Husband for the Wilde version, where the polish is covering something.
If period drawing rooms are not your thing, Cypher is the outlier and the most fun, a paranoid low budget science fiction film that keeps changing what it is about. The Net has dated the way all mid nineties internet thrillers have, which is most of its charm now. For television, The Tudors gives him Sir Thomas More and by some distance the show's most restrained performance, and The Crown uses him as Anthony Eden, a prime minister running out of room.