Jack Lowden

Jack Lowden (born 2 June 1990) is a Scottish actor whose screen and stage work includes historical drama, contemporary thrillers, and live theatre. He was born in Chelmsford, Essex, and grew up in Oxton, in the Scottish Borders. As a child, he joined the Scottish Youth Theatre and later studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, graduating in 2011.

His early television roles included Adam in the BBC adaptation of The Passing Bells and Nikolai Rostov in the BBC's 2016 serial War & Peace, adapted from Leo Tolstoy's novel. Lowden played RAF pilot Collins in Christopher Nolan's 2017 film Dunkirk. The character is one of the British soldiers attempting evacuation from the French coast during the Second World War.

In Matt Palmer's 2018 thriller Calibre, Lowden portrayed Vaughn, a man whose weekend hunting trip in the Scottish Highlands with his friend Marcus turns catastrophic after a shooting. Netflix released the film internationally. He then played Zak “Zodiac” Bevis, wrestler brother of Paige, in Stephen Merchant's Fighting with My Family (2019). The film drew on the Knight family's wrestling story and Paige's route to WWE.

Lowden appeared as Lord Bothwell in Mary Queen of Scots (2018), opposite Saoirse Ronan as Mary Stuart and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth I. He portrayed poet Siegfried Sassoon in Terence Davies's Benediction (2021), a film focused on Sassoon's postwar life and relationships. The performance earned Lowden a British Independent Film Award for Best Actor.

Since 2022, he has played MI5 agent River Cartwright in Apple TV+'s Slow Horses. Based on Mick Herron's Slough House novels, the series follows disgraced British intelligence officers assigned to Slough House; River is the grandson of former service chief David Cartwright, played by Jonathan Pryce. Lowden also played criminal Kenneth Noye in the BBC drama The Gold (2023), which dramatizes aspects of the 1983 Brink's-Mat gold robbery and its aftermath.

On stage, Lowden played Oswald in Richard Eyre's 2013 production of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts, alongside Lesley Manville. His performance brought him an Olivier Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. In 2014, he played the title role in the Almeida Theatre's adaptation of Euripides' The Oresteia, directed by Robert Icke. He received the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role at the 2016 ceremony for his portrayal of Orestes.

In 2019, Lowden co-founded Reiver Pictures with brother Calum, a company developing film and television projects in Scotland.