Rupert Friend

At 42 years old, Rupert Friend has this physical status:

Friend played three minor roles in a stage production of The Laramie Project when he was in his third year in drama school, and was spotted by a casting director. He made his acting debut as Billy Downs opposite Johnny Depp in the 2004 film The Libertine, for which he was named "outstanding new talent" at the 2005 Satellite Awards. He later stated that working with Depp so early in his career was a great lesson in film-acting. In 2005, Friend had his first starring role as Ludovic Meyer in the film adaption of Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, in which he starred opposite Joan Plowright. In the same year, he portrayed George Wickham in Joe Wright's version of Pride & Prejudice.

Aged 22, Friend was offered a screentest for the part of James Bond after Pierce Brosnan stepped down from the role. He refused, because he felt he lacked the life experience necessary to play the role of Bond.

In 2009, Friend starred in the film Chéri, playing the title character opposite Michelle Pfeiffer. He joined the cast of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas as Kurt Kotler, a lieutenant in Nazi Germany. In 2010, Friend played Albert, Prince Consort in The Young Victoria. Graham King, producer of Young Victoria, invited Friend to test for the lead role because he remembered his performance in Pride & Prejudice. His portrayal of Albert received acclaim, especially for his attention to detail and throrough preparation for the role. Friend said that the real challenge had been to find a way to portray the darker sides of an essentially good man like Albert, in order to give depth to the character. Around this time, a critic called Friend one of Britain's finest young actors.

In 2010, Friend made his stage debut as Mitchell in the UK premiere of The Little Dog Laughed. He followed this with Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle, in which he played the lead character to good reviews. He starred in the film The Kid, based on the novel by Kevin Lewis. As the film involves boxing, he trained to improve his physical and psychological shape. Criticial reception of The Kid overall was less than favourable. He also starred in a French film called Lullaby for Pi, playing a singer called Sam. In 2011, he played Thomas Anders, the protagonist of the film 5 Days of War, which did not receive great reviews .

By 2012, Friend felt dissatisfied with his career and rethought his overall approach to his work and selecting his projects. He has dismissed reports in the media that at that time he considered giving up acting entirely.

In 2013, he played the prison psychologist Oliver Baumer in the film Starred Up. His performance was applauded by critics and nominated for a BIFA Award for Best Supporting Actor. In 2015, he starred as Agent 47 in Hitman: Agent 47, a film based on the Hitman video game franchise, replacing Paul Walker. In order to play the role, he had to shave all his hair. He performed most of his own stunts. The production team sent him copies of all the Hitman games to familiarize himself with the character. However, Friend who calls himself a technophobe, was only able to walk his avatar in circles and soon gave up. The film received mixed reviews. In 2015, Friend provided narration for Nick Knight's folk horror fashion film, The Face of a Dying Dog.

Friend gained worldwide recognition as CIA operative and assassin Peter Quinn in the acclaimed political thriller series Homeland (2012–2017), his first role in a television-series. Introduced in season two as a supporting character, his role became significantly more important as of season three. His performance received widespread acclaim and he was nominated for three awards, including a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor In A Drama Series in 2013. When his character Peter Quinn died in season six, Friend's departure from the series was mourned by the press and fans.

After his involvement in Homeland ended in 2017, Friend acted in a number of comedies. In a 2014 interview he had already said that he also wanted to explore the 'farcical side' to his acting. He was offered the lead role in Paul Feig's A Simple Favor, but turned it down to play a funny smaller part in the film instead. He was described as displaying "serious comedic chops" in Armando Iannucci's The Death of Stalin, where he played Stalin's son Vasily.

He was asked by director and painter Julian Schnabel to play Theo van Gogh in At Eternity's Gate (2018), an award-winning biopic about Vincent van Gogh who was played by Willem Dafoe. Friend played the role of the mysterious Ernest Donovan in the series Strange Angel from 2018 to 2019; his performance was praised as being 'of amusing weirdness and a creepy-crawly intensity'.

In 2018 Friend performed a new audio drama by John Patrick Shanley, Last Night in the Garden I Saw You, which featured Michelle Williams. The following year, Friend was asked by screenwriter David Koepp to narrate the audiobook of his debut novel Cold Storage. He voiced the character of Peter Hardy in the 2019 Gimlet scripted podcast Motherhacker.

In the early 2020s, Friend joined the group of actors regularly working with director Wes Anderson. The collaboration started with a cameo appearance as an actor playing a drill-sergeant in The French Dispatch (2021), and continued with a more substantial role in the upcoming film Asteroid City. He will play a leading role in Anderson's Netflix project The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which began filming in 2022. This film is based on the stories by Roald Dahl, whom Friend has described as a hero of his.

In 2021, after his success portraying a spy in Homeland, Friend was once again mentioned as the possible next James Bond when Daniel Craig gave up the role. He played a lead role in the 2021 horror film Separation, which got largely negative reviews although Friend's performance as a single father did receive praise. The science fiction film Infinite (2021) in which he played the character Barton alongside Mark Wahlberg, was listed as one of the worst films of 2021.

The following year, Friend played network boss Wilson Sikorsy in Tim Kirkby's film Last Looks (2022), which got positive reviews. He starred opposite Sienna Miller and Michelle Dockery as James Whitehouse, a British politician on trial for rape, in the Netflix mini-series Anatomy of a Scandal. Friend initially turned down the role twice, because he did not feel enough affinity with the privileged Whitehouse. He was only persuaded to take on the part when director S.J. Clarkson challenged him to find a way to portray the humanity of the character. His acting was generally praised, with the series itself getting mixed reviews from critics.

Friend featured as the Grand Inquisitor in Disney+'s series Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022), an experience he said he enjoyed and would like to repeat. The role was physically demanding: the Grand Inquisitor's armour weighed 45 pounds and every day of shooting it took a team of makeup artists four hours to apply the makeup and prosthetics required for the role.

He will portray one of the main characters in the comedy series High Desert, with Patricia Arquette and Matt Dillon (in production). In February 2022, it was announced that Friend would play a lead role in Zack Snyder's science fiction film Rebel Moon; he withdrew from the project because of scheduling problems. He will be part of the QCode musical podcast series Cupid, planned for release in the summer of 2022.

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