Jack Lowden

Jack Lowden is a Scottish actor known for his lead role as River Cartwright in the acclaimed Apple TV+ spy series “Slow Horses,” and for a stage and screen career spanning war epics, period dramas and independent film. Born on 2 June 1990 in Essex, England, he was raised from a young age in the village of Oxton in the Scottish Borders and trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, graduating in 2011.

He first made his mark on stage. His performance as Oswald in a 2013 production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” won him the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role and the Ian Charleson Award, following earlier acclaim in the National Theatre of Scotland’s “Black Watch” and a West End run in “Chariots of Fire.”

On screen, Lowden gained wider recognition as Nikolai Rostov in the BBC’s 2016 adaptation of “War & Peace.” Film roles followed in Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” (2017), “England Is Mine” (2017, as a young Morrissey), “Mary Queen of Scots” (2018, as Lord Darnley) and the wrestling comedy-drama “Fighting with My Family” (2019). His performances in the Scottish thriller “Calibre” (2018) and the Siegfried Sassoon biopic “Benediction” (2022) each won him the British Academy Scotland Award for Best Film Actor.

Since 2022 he has starred as the dogged MI5 officer River Cartwright in “Slow Horses,” a role that has brought him Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, and he played the gangster Kenneth Noye in the BBC crime drama “The Gold.”

Lowden is set to play Mr. Darcy in Netflix’s 2026 adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice.” A supporter of Scottish independence, he founded the production company Reiver Pictures in 2019, and in 2024 he married the actress Saoirse Ronan, whom he had met on the set of “Mary Queen of Scots.” With a body of work bridging theatre, blockbuster cinema and prestige television, he is regarded as one of Scotland’s leading actors of his generation.