Juno Temple
Juno Temple is an actor, born 1989.
Juno Temple grew up around film sets, the daughter of the director Julien Temple and the producer Amanda Pirie, and started as a child actor in serious British pictures: Notes on a Scandal, then Lola in Atonement, then The Other Boleyn Girl. What she did next is unusual for someone with that much access. Rather than chase leads in studio films, she spent most of her twenties in small, difficult, frequently unpleasant independents.
The roles were young women written as damaged or dangerous or both, in Killer Joe, Dirty Girl, Kaboom, Lovelace and Magic Magic, and she plays them without ever asking the audience for sympathy. It is a body of work that failed to make her famous and made her very good. BAFTA gave her its Rising Star Award in 2013, and the bigger films she did take, The Dark Knight Rises, the Maleficent pictures, Black Mass, used almost none of what she can do.
Television changed that. Keeley Jones in Ted Lasso is a genuinely hard trick, a character with no cynicism in her at all, and Temple keeps her from tipping into saccharine across three seasons. Then the fifth season of Fargo handed her Dot Lyon, a Minnesota housewife with a past and an extraordinary tolerance for pain, in a performance that is funny and feral in the same breath. Primetime Emmy nominations for both, and a Golden Globe nomination for the second.
Movies (42)
- Swapped (2026)
- Venom: The Last Dance (2024)
- Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2026)
- The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
- Maleficent (2014)
- Roofman (2025)
- Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019)
- Hannah Waddingham: Home for Christmas (2023)
- Atonement (2007)
- Palmer (2021)
- Wild Child (2008)
- Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014)
- Mr. Nobody (2009)
- The Three Musketeers (2011)
- The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)
- Black Mass (2015)
- Lovelace (2013)
- Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)
- Notes on a Scandal (2006)
- Year One (2009)
- Horns (2013)
- Killer Joe (2012)
- Cracks (2009)
- St Trinian's (2007)
- Unsane (2018)
- Greenberg (2010)
- The Brass Teapot (2012)
- St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009)
- Wonder Wheel (2017)
- Small Apartments (2012)
TV (6)
Where to start with Juno Temple
Most people arrive through Ted Lasso, and that is a fine door. Keeley could have been wallpaper; instead she is the warmest and most competent person on the show, which is entirely down to how Temple plays her.
Go straight from there to Fargo, where the fifth season gives her a lead built on the opposite qualities: watchful, funny, and very hard to kill. The contrast between the two performances is the best case anyone could make for her.
For the early work, Atonement is where you first notice her, and Far from the Madding Crowd shows the period-drama register she could have coasted on.
Killer Joe is the important one and the nastiest film on the list; go in warned. Palmer is the quiet, underseen drama, and Horns the odd genre swing.
The recent television
Ted Lasso made her famous for playing someone genuinely kind, which is not what anyone had been hiring her for, and Fargo then handed her a lead and a Golden Globe nomination.
The difficult independents
A decade of small, uncomfortable films before the television work arrived. Killer Joe is the hardest of them and Magic Magic is the strangest. Both come from the stretch when she was taking almost nothing that could be called commercial.
The British period work
She started young in English costume drama and kept returning to it, generally as the girl who is more trouble than she looks. She was frequently the youngest person on those sets and is generally the one the plot turns on.
The blockbusters
The commercial half of the filmography, from two Maleficent films to the Batman and Venom franchises, usually in a supporting part with a memorable few minutes. None of them ask much of her, but she is never less than watchable in the few minutes she gets.
Juno Temple on CrossBinge
- Cover Story: Can Ted Lasso Do It Twice?