Please Rewind Talent Wall

David Thewlis

David Thewlis has built a career around characters who rarely feel settled or easily explained. Whether playing an embittered street philosopher, a compassionate professor or a quietly menacing antagonist, the British actor brings an alert, unpredictable quality to the screen. Born David Wheeler in Blackpool on 20 March 1963, Thewlis played guitar in rock and punk bands as a teenager before training at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, graduating in 1984. He adopted his mother’s maiden name professionally after discovering that another actor was already registered as David Wheeler. Early work included theatre, appearances in Only Fools and Horses and The Singing Detective, and his film debut in Little Dorrit. His defining breakthrough came with Mike Leigh’s Naked in 1993. As Johnny, a homeless, fiercely intelligent and embittered street philosopher, Thewlis delivered a leading performance that earned Best Actor honours from the Cannes Film Festival, the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle, the London Film Critics Circle and the Evening Standard. It established his particular gift for making difficult, verbose and abrasive characters compelling without sanding down their edges. The roles that followed covered unusually broad territory. His 1990s films included Black Beauty, Total Eclipse, Dragonheart, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Seven Years in Tibet and The Big Lebowski. A new generation came to know him as Professor Remus Lupin in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, a role he reprised in four further films in the series. Thewlis later played Ares in Wonder Woman and V. Varga in Fargo’s third season, with the latter performance earning Emmy, Critics’ Choice Television and Golden Globe nominations. His more recent work includes I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Landscapers, The Sandman, Enola Holmes 2, The Artful Dodger and Kaos. He has also worked as a voice actor, notably as the Shame Wizard in Big Mouth and Human Resources. Beyond acting, Thewlis directed the BAFTA-nominated short Hello, Hello, Hello, wrote and directed the feature Cheeky, and published the novels The Late Hector Kipling and Shooting Martha. It is a varied body of work, but the connecting thread is his appetite for characters with something restless moving beneath the surface.