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Cary Elwes

Cary Elwes has built a career on an unusually useful combination of sincerity, comic timing and an ability to turn polished charm in darker directions. Born in Westminster, London, in 1962, the British actor trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art before moving to the United States to study acting at Sarah Lawrence College, the Actors Studio and the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. After making his acting debut in Another Country in 1984, Elwes played Guilford Dudley opposite Helena Bonham Carter in Lady Jane. His defining early role arrived as Westley, the stable boy turned swashbuckler at the heart of Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride. The film grew into a cult favourite through television and home video, while Elwes’s straight-faced romantic confidence proved essential to its mix of fantasy, adventure and comedy. He continued to move easily between leading and supporting parts. Elwes played Robin Hood in Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights and appeared in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Days of Thunder, Twister, Liar Liar and Kiss the Girls. In Saw, he took on one of his sharpest changes of register as Dr. Lawrence Gordon, later returning to the role in Saw 3D. His film work has also included The Cat’s Meow, Ella Enchanted and Shadow of the Vampire. Television has given Elwes another wide field to work in. He portrayed astronaut Michael Collins in From the Earth to the Moon, held a recurring role as FBI Assistant Director Brad Follmer in The X-Files and repeatedly appeared as art thief Pierre Despereaux in Psych. Later roles included Mayor Larry Kline in Stranger Things and Gavin Hawk in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Alongside film, television and stage acting, Elwes has worked as a voice actor, screenwriter and producer. He voiced characters across animation and games, played five roles in A Christmas Carol, co-wrote the screenplay for Elvis & Nixon and revisited his best-known production in the memoir As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride. It is a varied body of work, held together by an actor equally comfortable with adventure, parody, period drama and horror.