Rise to Fame
A LAMDA graduate who spent years doing the right stage work, The History Boys gave him a Drama Desk nomination and a film deal before most people knew his name. But The Devil's Double (2011) is the performance that should've changed everything: playing both Uday Hussein and his body double Latif Yahia, often switching between them within a single shooting day, he turned what could've been a gimmick into something genuinely unsettling. Critics called it career-making. The Oscar buzz was real. The movie didn't quite break through, but the performance still holds.
In the Spotlight
Four seasons as Jesse Custer on Preacher (2016-2019) gave him the franchise slot most actors would die for, but AMC never quite committed the resources to make it a phenomenon. The show ran 43 episodes on real cult energy before AMC quietly let it end. Since then he's been circling between prestige limited series and franchise maintenance: My Lady Jane (Amazon, 2024), a crime drama called Suspect (Channel 4, 2024), and an Apple TV+ thriller called The Last Frontier (2025). The work is consistent, the profile is not quite where The Devil's Double suggested it would be.
Side Notes
The stranger career footnote: he met Ruth Negga at a 2009 National Theatre production of Phedre (Helen Mirren was the lead), dated her for six years, quietly split in 2016, then continued working together on Preacher for three more seasons while the public didn't learn about the breakup until 2018. She picked up an Oscar nomination for Loving in that same window. By all accounts, they stayed close. It's the kind of arrangement that would be awkward on almost any other project.