JJ Feild
JJ Feild is an actor, born 1978.
JJ Feild started working in television in 1999, and his early breaks were literary: Fred Garland in the Philip Pullman adaptations The Ruby in the Smoke and The Shadow in the North, then Henry Tilney in the 2007 television film of Northanger Abbey. He was born in Boulder, Colorado in 1978, is British American, and made his West End debut the year after Northanger Abbey in Ring Round the Moon.
Tilney is the key to him. Austen's least brooding hero is a talker, teasing and quick, and Feild plays him as genuinely amused rather than smouldering, which is rarer casting than it sounds. Six years later he played Mr. Henry Nobley in Austenland, a film about a resort where women pay to be courted by a Regency gentleman, so the joke is being told by an actor who had already been the real thing. Very few people have that particular career symmetry.
The rest is uniforms and period detail. James Montgomery Falsworth in Captain America: The First Avenger, Major John Andre across Turn: Washington's Spies from 2014 to 2016, Andrei in K-19: The Widowmaker, Thax in Centurion, Roy Lunn in Ford v Ferrari, Charles Guyette in Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, and the sleek Russian Lev Zubov in The Peripheral. He is very good at men who are polite and dangerous in the same breath, and the industry has never quite worked out what to build around that.
Movies (21)
- Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War (2026)
- Ford v Ferrari (2019)
- Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
- Centurion (2010)
- K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)
- Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017)
- Blood: The Last Vampire (2009)
- Goal III: Taking on the World (2009)
- Northanger Abbey (2007)
- The Etruscan Smile (2018)
- Last Orders (2001)
- Austenland (2013)
- The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (2001)
- The Intended (2002)
- The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark to the Finish (2005)
- A Life in Suitcases: A History of Tulse Luper (2005)
- The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story (2003)
- The Ruby in the Smoke (2006)
- Not Safe for Work (2014)
- The Railway Children (2000)
- The Night Watch (2011)
TV (7)
Where to start with JJ Feild
The entry point is Northanger Abbey, a single television film and the cheapest way to see what he does: charm without any smoulder, which makes the romance actually funny.
Then Austenland, which is the same performance wearing quotation marks and is more enjoyable if you have watched the first one. Together they make a strange little double bill about the same genre from both sides.
For the serious work go to TURN: Washington's Spies, where Major Andre is the most sympathetic person on the wrong side of the American Revolution and Feild gets several seasons to build him. The Peripheral is the best recent role, all velvet menace, and Captain America: The First Avenger is the biggest film he is in and gives him almost nothing to do. Ford v Ferrari and The Ruby in the Smoke fill out the picture.