Ben Hardy, the actor who commits to the role before he can play it

Ben Hardy

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	January 2, 1991 Bournemouth, Dorset, England
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Bohemian Rhapsody, X-Men: Apocalypse, Unicorns
Awards	SAG Award nomination · BIFA nomination: Best Joint Lead Performance

The audition for Bohemian Rhapsody asked whether Ben Hardy could play the drums. He said yes. This was not strictly true. Ten weeks of practicing ten hours a day followed, along with a personal lesson from Roger Taylor himself at Abbey Road Studios — one of the more physically demanding preparation processes a supporting role has required in recent British cinema. The episode is not a one-off. It is his method.

Hardy was born Ben Jones on 2 January 1991 in Bournemouth, Dorset, and grew up in Sherborne — a market town of quiet medieval architecture that offers few obvious routes toward franchise films. He studied at the Gryphon School, trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and in 2012 — a year out of drama school — was onstage at the Hampstead Theatre in David Hare’s The Judas Kiss, playing Arthur Wellesley opposite Rupert Everett. The production transferred to the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End. For a debut, it was not quiet.

In 2013 he joined EastEnders as Peter Beale, holding the role for 192 episodes across two years. The soap opera does what it always does: trains actors in public, in front of an audience that notices everything. He left in 2015 and, within a year, had filmed Archangel in X-Men: Apocalypse.

Then came Roger Taylor. He binge-listened to Queen’s catalogue for six months before filming, studied footage of Taylor at press junkets to isolate nervous tics and physical habits, had lied about his drumming ability to get into the room, and by the time Bohemian Rhapsody opened in 2018 had earned a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination alongside the ensemble cast. In 2017 he had played Wade Parker in Joseph Kosinski‘s Only the Brave — one of the Granite Mountain Hotshots killed in the Yarnell Hill Fire, a real death requiring a different accountability than a winged mutant — and John William Polidori in Mary Shelley. A BBC miniseries, The Woman in White, gave him the lead that same year as Walter Hartright in the Wilkie Collins adaptation.

The films after Bohemian Rhapsody are worth reading as choices rather than credits. He could have stepped directly into another franchise. He didn’t. Michael Bay‘s 6 Underground on Netflix in 2019 came first — large, loud, a small role — followed by the dark Irish comedy Pixie and the psychological thriller The Voyeurs, then the BBC/HBO Max drama The Girl Before, in which he played Edward Monkford, the architect whose immaculate house becomes the condition of a dangerous relationship. In 2023 he starred as Oliver in Love at First Sight on Netflix, a romantic comedy opposite Haley Lu Richardson — lighter work, deliberately so, the kind of register that demonstrates range without demanding spectacle.

The clearest statement of what Hardy is actually interested in came with Unicorns, co-directed by Sally El Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd. He plays Luke, a single father and mechanic from Essex who falls for Aysha, a British Indian drag queen navigating the gaysian club scene in East London. His preparation was defined by a deliberate absence: he avoided researching Aysha’s world because he wanted Luke’s wonder at it to be genuine, and read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now at El Hosaini’s suggestion. The film won the Special Jury Prize and Audience Award at the 2024 Dinard Film Festival and earned Hardy a British Independent Film Award nomination for Best Joint Lead Performance alongside co-star Jason Patel — a category that names him as still being discovered, a decade after EastEnders.

The critical observation is that he has consistently been one of several, not the centre. Bohemian Rhapsody was Rami Malek‘s film. Unicorns is a two-hander. In late 2025 he appeared as Tony Spera in The Conjuring: Last Rites, the final entry in the long-running horror franchise with Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson — a film that opened with the biggest global debut in horror history. Supporting work, again.

Two films in production are testing a different proposition. Die by Night, directed by Rod Blackhurst and co-starring Isabelle Fuhrman and Scoot McNairy, puts Hardy at the top of the cast as Barry, an injured survivor navigating a post-apocalyptic world where creatures called the Horde hunt in the dark — his first unambiguous lead in a genre film. Then in June 2026, production began in the UK on Eleven Missing Days, a noir mystery-thriller about the real 1926 disappearance of Agatha Christie, directed by Bertie Ellwood and featuring Vincent Cassel as a retired Belgian detective and Felicity Jones as Christie herself. Hardy’s role has not been disclosed.

Whether the discipline accumulated over twelve years — the faked drumming, the borrowed preparation, the deliberate proximity to leads rather than the lead itself — adds up to a moment when he steps forward alone is the question his next two films will begin to answer.

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Tags: actors, British actors, Ben Hardy, Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek, Roger Taylor

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