Rise to Fame
Eight years of West End grind bought him a direct ticket to Hollywood blockbusters with no intermediate steps. In 2010, zero film credits and three movies at once: Clash of the Titans, Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, and Tamara Drewe. The franchises stacked fast after that. Owen Shaw in Fast & Furious 6, Bard the Bowman in The Hobbit, Gaston in Beauty and the Beast. The unusual thing isn't that he got those roles. It's that the industry trusted him with leads and main antagonists so quickly. The theater training showed.
In the Spotlight
The Gaston era built the name recognition. What he's done with it is more interesting. The Alienist gave him a prestige TV credit with Emmy nominations attached. Nine Perfect Strangers added to that. A memoir in November 2024, Boy from the Valleys, put his story on the cultural map in a way his filmography never quite did: working-class Wales, Jehovah's Witnesses, openly gay in action blockbusters, none of it packaged or managed. His Broadway debut as Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show opens in spring 2026. Nobody taking the safe path books that role.
Side Notes
Growing up in Aberbargoed in the South Wales Valleys meant coal dust in the air and not much else. His parents were working-class Jehovah's Witnesses, his father a bricklayer, his mother a cleaner. The congregation baptized him young, and he left the faith at 16 once his sexuality made staying untenable. The shunning practice cut him off from everyone he knew. He's said 'everybody leaves you.' The door-to-door preaching turned out to have one durable use: he's credited it with giving him the thick skin for rejection that Hollywood requires. Winning a scholarship to the London Studio Centre at 17 is how a kid from Aberbargoed ended up in Miss Saigon.