Dominic Monaghan

He spent nearly three years playing the sidekick on a BBC detective show, then Peter Jackson turned him into a hobbit. The Lord of the Rings made him internationally recognizable, but it was Lost that gave him a real character arc. As Charlie Pace, a rock star washing out on a desert island while fighting a heroin addiction, he got to do the kind of emotional heavy lifting that fantasy franchises rarely asked of him. His final scene, writing "Not Penny's Boat" on his hand before drowning, is one of the most-quoted exits in network TV history.

Wild Things ran three seasons on BBC America through 2016 and earned a Critics' Choice nomination, not bad for what looked like a celebrity side project but turned out to be the thing he actually cared about most. His most visible recent work is Billy and Dom Eat the World, a food travel show on Prime Video with Billy Boyd that grew out of their Friendship Onion podcast, plus the two staged Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead together in 2024. He plays Merlin in The Librarians: The Next Chapter. Post-Lost, he's built something modest and clearly his own.

Born in Berlin to British parents and raised in Manchester, he arrived in Hollywood with a British accent, a Tolkien franchise, and a genuine wildlife obsession. His father taught biology, and the animal fixation stuck. He keeps snakes, scorpions, lizards, and beehives at home, and spent three seasons tracking dangerous creatures on Wild Things. The X handle DomsWildThings isn't a PR invention. He and Billy Boyd have been inseparable since the Fellowship wrapped, and at this point the friendship is almost a project in itself.