Aaron Taylor-Johnson

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is an English actor born on 13 June 1990 in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. He began acting as a child, appearing in the 2003 film Shanghai Knights as a young Charlie Chaplin and in television productions including The Bill and Feather Boy. His early screen work also included the BBC adaptation of The Thief Lord and the 2008 comedy Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, in which he played Robbie Jennings. His breakthrough came with two markedly different 2009–10 roles. In Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy, he portrayed John Lennon during the future Beatle’s Liverpool adolescence, focusing on Lennon’s complicated relationships with his mother Julia and aunt Mimi. He then became widely known as Dave Lizewski, the ordinary comic-book fan who decides to become the masked vigilante Kick-Ass, in Matthew Vaughn’s 2010 action comedy Kick-Ass. He reprised Dave in the 2013 sequel Kick-Ass 2. Taylor-Johnson’s subsequent films have ranged across period drama, crime, monster spectacle, and psychological thriller. He appeared in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina as Vronsky, Oliver Stone’s Savages as Ben, and Albert Nobbs alongside Glenn Close. In Gareth Edwards’s 2014 Godzilla, he played U.S. Navy officer Ford Brody, whose attempts to reunite with his family unfold amid the emergence of enormous creatures. In 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, he played Pietro Maximoff, also known as Quicksilver, a super-fast Sokovian twin recruited by the Avengers against Ultron. His performance as the violent drifter Ray Marcus in Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals earned him the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2017, as well as a BAFTA nomination. The role placed him opposite Michael Shannon in the film-within-the-film adaptation of Tony and Susan, the fictional manuscript central to Ford’s thriller. Later credits include James Douglas, Lord of Douglas, in David Mackenzie’s medieval drama Outlaw King; military handler Ives in Christopher Nolan’s time-bending Tenet; and the assassin Tangerine in David Leitch’s Bullet Train. In 2024, he starred as Sergei Kravinoff in Kraven the Hunter, a Marvel-based film centered on the character’s origin, and played stunt performer-turned-action-star Tom Ryder in The Fall Guy. He also appeared in Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu as Thomas Hutter, the estate agent sent to meet the mysterious Count Orlok.