Archie Renaux Stops Playing the Best Friend: WAR Hands Him the Dilemma

Archie Renaux

Photo: GabboT / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 22, 1997 Kingston upon Thames, London, England
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Alien: Romulus, The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Morbius

Two characters called Johnny reached audiences within days of each other, and they pull Archie Renaux in opposite directions. In Falling, the London romance written and directed by the brothers James and Colin Krisel, he is the best friend who falls for the woman KJ Apa’s character is dating, the second man in the frame. In War, George Kay’s legal drama for Sky and HBO, he is Jonathan “Johnny” Warren, a young lawyer pulled into a celebrity divorce and asked, episode after episode, how far he is prepared to go to win. One Johnny waits beside the story. The other one is the story’s question.

That split runs through the whole career so far. Renaux became visible to a global audience as Mal Oretsev, the loyal orphan tracker of Netflix‘s Shadow and Bone, and then spent the next years in the position next to the protagonist. In Alien: Romulus the film belonged to Cailee Spaeny; in Upgraded he was the charming stranger in first class who mistakes Camila Mendes for her boss. Good work, most of it. Rarely the centre of gravity.

Renaux is a stage name. Archie James Beale was born in Kingston upon Thames on 22 November 1997 and grew up in nearby Tolworth, with two sisters, a brother and Anglo-Indian roots on his mother’s side. Acting began in weekend classes, but his parents were blunt about the odds. “My parents made that very clear,” he told W Magazine. So he took the safe road first: a nine-to-five apprenticeship as an air-conditioning engineer, his grandfather’s trade. “It took me doing an apprenticeship to realize I wasn’t happy,” he said.

A modelling agency had spotted him at those weekend classes, and campaigns for Topman and Moss Bros, plus Men’s Fashion Week, paid for the change of direction while he trained at The Unseen, a drama school in London. Television came quickly. In the BBC One miniseries Gold Digger he played Leo Day, the 25-year-old son who still lives with his mother, played by Julia Ormond, and who cannot stand the much younger boyfriend she brings home. That boyfriend was Ben Barnes, the actor who would soon be the Darkling opposite him in another, far larger production.

Netflix announced him in the main cast of Shadow and Bone, its adaptation of Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels, in October 2019, and the series premiered in April 2021. Mal is the childhood friend of Alina Starkov, played by Jessie Mei Li, a soldier who keeps crossing a war-torn map to reach her while Barnes’s Darkling pulls her the other way. Book readers had long been divided over the character, and Renaux knew it: “A few people hate my character. You can’t be everyone’s favorite.” The series ran for two seasons and sixteen episodes before Netflix cancelled it in November 2023, taking the planned Six of Crows spin-off down with it.

Cinema used him in a similar register, with more variety than weight. He was Alex in Neil Burger’s Voyagers, a young crew member on a generational spaceship, had a brief part in Morbius, and played Edward, the monk brother of Bella Ramsey’s heroine, in Lena Dunham’s Catherine Called Birdy. For Peter Farrelly’s The Greatest Beer Run Ever he played Tommy Collins, a real soldier whom Zac Efron‘s character tracks down in Vietnam, and he sat down with the real Collins before filming to handle the story, in his words, “with lots of delicacy”.

Then came 2024, the year the size of the parts changed. Upgraded, Carlson Young’s Prime Video comedy, gave him the male lead in a modern Cinderella story. The BBC thriller The Jetty, created by Cat Jones, cast him as Hitch, the police colleague of Jenna Coleman’s detective in a Lancashire lake town, in a four-part series about grooming and consent that averaged more than six million viewers. And Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus made him Tyler, one of six young colonists who board an abandoned station to steal cryostasis pods, in a film that grossed around 351 million dollars worldwide.

The record also shows the limits. Upgraded drew polite notices that found it pleasant and short on surprises, the kind of review that leaves the lead neither helped nor harmed. Shadow and Bone ended with Mal’s arc cut off mid-sentence, through a business decision rather than any verdict on him. And the parts that drew the biggest audiences were ensemble jobs, where his task was to be the steady point while somebody else transformed. Calling that a ceiling would be unfair. It is closer to an unanswered question: whether he can carry the story instead of holding it up for someone else.

War is the first serious attempt at an answer. The eight-episode series follows two rival London firms, Cathcarts & Sons and Taylor & Byrne, as they fight over the divorce of a tech entrepreneur played by Dominic West and a film star played by Sienna Miller, with Ben Taylor as lead director. Johnny is the audience’s way into that world, which means his ambition is the lens through which every manoeuvre is judged. The show premiered on HBO on 1 October 2026 and on Sky and NOW in the UK and Ireland the following day, with new episodes weekly, and Sky and HBO have already ordered a second season.

Falling opened in select US cinemas through Brainstorm Media on 9 October and reaches video on demand on 10 November. Away from sets, Renaux and his partner Annie O’Hara had a daughter in October 2020 and announced their engagement in August 2024; he is a Chelsea supporter. The next move is set by the two Johnnys. If War holds its audience, the best-friend roles become a choice rather than a default, and that is the first time his career has been in a position to say no to them.

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Tags: actors, Sienna Miller, Dominic West, Alien: Romulus, Archie Renaux, Ben Barnes

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