Martin Freeman

The Office gave him Tim Canterbury in 2001, the lovelorn everyman who made the side-eye to camera a performance technique. He's said the role cast a long shadow and he worried about typecasting. He broke it by going darker: Bilbo Baggins across three Hobbit films, then Lester Nygaard in Fargo's first season (2014), a meek insurance salesman who commits a murder and keeps making it worse. The Dr. Watson run in Sherlock earned him a 2014 Emmy. He wasn't just the charming British guy. He was the guy you cast when ordinary is the whole point.

After the franchise years (three Hobbit films, three MCU appearances as Everett Ross), Freeman has been pushing toward smaller, stranger work. He sold out The Fifth Step, a dark AA comedy, at London's @sohoplace in 2025, with NT Live distributing it to cinemas. He co-founded One Trick Pone, a production company, with partner Rachel Benaissa the same year. Netflix's Seven Dials adaptation cast him alongside Helena Bonham Carter in January 2026. The blockbuster phase looks finished. What's coming next is more interesting.

His father, a naval officer, died of a heart attack when Freeman was nine. The more revealing detail is the music obsession: he co-curated a jazz compilation on Acid Jazz Records in 2018, considers Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life the best record ever made, and has the Paul Weller devotion of someone who'd fight you over it. He played squash for the British national team until he was 14. The everyman casting was always a decision, not a personality.