Matthew Goode

Matthew Goode was born on 3 April 1978 in Exeter, Devon, England. He grew up near Exeter and attended Exeter School, where he developed an interest in acting. Goode studied drama at the University of Birmingham and trained at London’s Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. His early screen career included the BBC television film Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister in 2000, but his first major film role came in Chasing Liberty (2004). He played Ben, a British agent assigned to protect Mandy Moore’s presidential daughter. The film introduced him to international audiences and showcased his charm on screen.

Goode’s next roles showed greater range. In Woody Allen’s Match Point (2005), he played Tom Hewett, an affluent young man whose engagement helps drive the film’s moral and social tensions. He then portrayed Charles Ryder in Julian Jarrold’s Brideshead Revisited (2008), an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel. The part required him to anchor a story about class, faith, friendship, and desire, opposite Ben Whishaw and Hayley Atwell. In Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2009), Goode appeared as Jim, the longtime partner of Colin Firth’s grieving professor. That same year, he played Adrian Veidt, also known as Ozymandias, in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen.

His subsequent credits combined literary drama, comedy, and franchise filmmaking. He starred with Amy Adams in Leap Year (2010), played an unfaithful husband in the psychological thriller Stoker (2013), and portrayed Hugh Alexander in The Imitation Game (2014), the drama about Alan Turing’s codebreaking team during World War II. Goode later joined the Kingsman series, playing Merlin in Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017). He also played Henry Talbot in the Downton Abbey film (2019), returning a character introduced during the television series’ final season. In television, he portrayed photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones in the third and fourth seasons of The Crown.

Goode’s television work also includes the lead role of Matthew Clairmont in A Discovery of Witches, based on Deborah Harkness’s All Souls trilogy. The character is a centuries-old vampire, historian, and geneticist who becomes involved with witch Diana Bishop, played by Teresa Palmer. Goode appeared as Robert Evans in The Offer (2022), which dramatizes the making of The Godfather. His films include The King’s Man (2021), where he plays Morton. He also played Sidney Stark in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018). Across projects, he moves between drama, thrillers, comedy, and fantasy, showing intelligence, restraint, and vulnerability.