David Jonsson built an android’s soul — now Marvel hands him a kingdom

David Jonsson

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 4, 1993 Custom House, London, England
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Alien: Romulus, The Long Walk, Rye Lane
Awards	BAFTA · Black British Theatre · Independent Spirit

The role of Andy in Alien: Romulus came with no playbook. An android is not quite human and not quite machine — it has no lived experience to draw on, no unconscious inheritance of gesture and rhythm, no shadow of what it has loved and lost. David Jonsson had to build one from scratch, and the question he kept returning to was not “how does a synthetic behave” but “what does a synthetic want.” That inversion is, in hindsight, what made the performance impossible to ignore.

Jonsson grew up in Custom House, the part of East London where the Docklands give way to ordinary terraced streets. His father was an IT engineer at Heathrow Airport; his mother worked for the Metropolitan Police. Of his heritage — Sierra Leone Creole, Nigerian, and Swedish — he has spoken as a layering he carries into every room he enters, alert to how he is being read. He went to New York for two years after GCSEs, came back to join the National Youth Theatre, then trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 2016 with a conviction about performance and almost no plan for what came after.

The stage came first. His West End debut was in Mary Stuart at the Almeida, directed by Robert Icke — a demanding production that required stillness the camera rarely rewards. Don Juan in Soho followed, and then and breathe…, a piece about the Black community in Britain that won him the Black British Theatre Award for Best Male Actor. The theatre work is where he learned the principle he later applied to Andy: performance is not about showing the emotion; it is about containing it.

The television series Industry, which began on BBC Two and HBO in 2020, gave Jonsson his first sustained screen role — Augustus “Gus” Sackey, a city trader navigating a London investment bank with the particular alertness of someone who knows his presence there is conditional. The performance was deliberate and controlled, working at a frequency that rewards attention rather than demanding it. It confirmed that what he does on stage translates to screen without losing its density.

Rye Lane, Raine Allen-Miller’s romantic comedy set across a single day in South London, was a different register: charming, quick, emotionally exposed. Jonsson played Dom — recently heartbroken, disarmed by the situation — and the film earned him a British Independent Film Award nomination for Best Joint Lead alongside Vivian Oparah. It established that he could carry a film on warmth as well as precision. Then came Alien: Romulus, and the franchise that would change everything.

What director Fede Álvarez wanted from Andy was a deliberate break with the tradition the franchise had built around its synthetic characters — not a tool, not a menace, but an entity in genuine moral distress. The risk was sentimentality. What Jonsson delivered was something more unsettling: an android trying so hard to be human that his care for the people around him becomes its own kind of tragedy. Some critics argued the performance overbalanced the film, pulling focus from the survival-horror mechanics the series runs on. The counterargument is that Andy is the only character in Alien: Romulus who is fully present — who, having no biological stake in survival, is the only one choosing to act. Jonsson has not disputed the criticism. He has simply pointed toward the next project.

The EE BAFTA Rising Star Award, voted by the public rather than industry bodies, went to Jonsson in February 2025 — ahead of Marisa Abela, Jharrel Jerome, Mikey Madison, and Nabhaan Rizwan. It is an award that has historically tracked the precise moment a talent shifts from “known to film audiences” to “known.” The same year, he appeared in Francis Lawrence’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Long Walk as Peter McVries, and in Wasteman, which he also executive-produced — a signal of where his ambitions sit when the cameras are not running.

The announcement at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2026 that Jonsson will play T’Challa II — the grown son of Chadwick Boseman’s king — in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther 3 arrived with weight that cannot be managed by craft alone. Boseman died in 2020; his absence is part of the franchise’s architecture now, not a gap to fill but a gravity to navigate. Jonsson also has Benn/Eubank ahead of him, playing Chris Eubank in one of British boxing’s defining rivalries, and Scandalous!, in which he plays Sammy Davis Jr. alongside Sydney Sweeney as Kim Novak. Each project requires inhabiting a real person — which is a different pressure from inventing one.

Black Panther 3 opens in December 2028. What Jonsson builds before it — and how he handles the weight of it after — will be the argument his career has been making since a synthetic human walked into a horror franchise and asked what it means to want to survive.