Jared Harris

Biography

Jared Harris (born London, 1961) is a British actor of stage, film and television, known for supporting roles in large productions and for his work in acclaimed television series. The son of the Irish actor Richard Harris, he started out on the stage before working on screen. His career runs from independent cinema of the 1990s to the big-budget films of the following decade, and on television he has earned enough recognition to rank among the most sought-after performers of his generation.

His training crossed the Atlantic and back. He studied drama at Duke University in North Carolina, graduating in 1984, and then trained as an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Before acting, he directed Darkmoor in 1983, an unfinished feature he made for the university. His first screen role was in The Rachel Papers (1989), directed by his brother Damian. In the 1990s he took parts in Far and Away, The Last of the Mohicans, Natural Born Killers and Dead Man, directed by Jim Jarmusch, as well as Happiness, Todd Solondz's uneasy black comedy, in which he played an unsettling character.

From the 2000s his profile grew. He appeared in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Lady in the Water and Lost in Space, and played Andy Warhol in I Shot Andy Warhol. On television, his role as Lane Pryce, a British newcomer at an advertising firm in New York in Mad Men, earned him an Emmy nomination. Then came Ulysses S. Grant in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, the criminal mastermind James Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Captain Francis Crozier in The Terror. His performance as Valery Legasov in Chernobyl brought him the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor and wider attention at the Emmys and Golden Globes.

He has also kept up a steady stage career, with Off-Broadway productions and with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he played classics such as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. More recently he has led Apple TV+'s Foundation as Hari Seldon and appeared in Morbius (2022) and A House of Dynamite (2025). His legacy rests on a body of work built on restraint and dramatic weight, and he remains active.

Key films

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008): a supporting role in David Fincher's large-scale drama starring Brad Pitt.
• Lincoln (2012): he plays Ulysses S. Grant in Steven Spielberg's historical drama.
• Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011): he plays James Moriarty, the detective's central adversary.
• The Last of the Mohicans (1992): one of his early prominent parts in a period epic.