Iain Glen

He won the Silver Bear at Berlin for Silent Scream in 1990, picked up three Olivier nominations on the London stage, and still spent most of the 90s and 2000s as a name that theater people recognized and everyone else didn't. Game of Thrones fixed that. Ser Jorah Mormont, the disgraced knight who trails Daenerys Targaryen across continents while she refuses to love him back, was a role built on restraint. He played it for eight seasons and made the character's loyalty feel tragic rather than pathetic.

After eight seasons as the most devoted man in Westeros, he pivoted without much pause. He played Bruce Wayne in Titans from 2019 to 2021, a version that was older, more conflicted, and had none of the usual mythology attached. Two concurrent streaming series followed: The Rig on Prime Video and Silo on AppleTV+. None of it trades on the Jorah legacy, which is probably the point.

He ended up at RADA only because it was the only drama school accepting applications when he happened to be looking. He won the Bancroft Gold Medal there, the school's top prize. His older brother, Hamish Glen, spent eighteen years as artistic director of the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry before stepping down in 2022, which makes the family's theatrical credentials almost absurdly concentrated. He didn't find acting through ambition. A friend dragged him into a university production of The Crucible after a distinctly unfocused adolescence, and it stuck.