Max Pirkis
Max Pirkis is an actor, born 1989.
A film crew went to Eton looking for a schoolboy and left with Max Pirkis. He had done two stage productions and nothing else when he was put in front of a camera as Midshipman Blakeney in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World in 2003, a boy officer on a Napoleonic warship. The performance won him the Evening Standard British Film Award for Most Promising Newcomer and a Young Artist Award.
Two years later the BBC and HBO cast him as Gaius Octavian in Rome, the boy who would become Augustus, and he held the part for two years of the show's run. It is a genuinely difficult piece of casting, a teenager who has to read as more dangerous than the adult generals standing around him, and Pirkis made the coldness look like intelligence rather than affectation.
Then almost nothing. He came back in 2014 for two films, the Hammer ghost story The Quiet Ones and the drama Flying Home, and that is the whole screen record on this page. A very short filmography with two genuinely good things in it, which is more than a lot of longer ones manage.
Movies (3)
TV (1)
Where to start with Max Pirkis
Watch Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World first, and not only for him. Peter Weir's film is the best thing on this page by a distance, and Blakeney is quietly its emotional centre: a child learning seamanship from one man and natural history from another, while the two of them disagree about almost everything.
Then Rome, for the other half of the reputation. Octavian in the early stretch of that series is one of the great pieces of television casting, and it makes a useful double bill with Master and Commander, since both parts ask a young actor to be the most composed person in the room.
The Quiet Ones and Flying Home, both from 2014, are the completist round: a Hammer haunting and a small European drama, neither of which asks him to do much.