Joseph Quinn, the actor who keeps choosing to be one of four

Joseph Quinn

Photo: France RC – Roster Con / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 26, 1994 London, United Kingdom
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Fantastic 4: First Steps, Gladiator II, Overlord
Awards	MTV Movie & TV · British Independent Film (shared) · Manchester Theatre

Joseph Quinn became famous by dying. The character that put his face on phone screens around the world, the metal-loving outcast Eddie Munson of Stranger Things, was killed off at the end of the same season that introduced him, and the London actor has spent the years since in an odd position for someone with that level of recognition: he is almost never alone at the top of the poster. He has shared the throne of Rome with a brother emperor and joined Marvel’s first family as its hothead, and he is now filming as one of the four Beatles, cast as the one history filed under “the quiet one”. The question his career keeps asking is whether all that company is a strategy or a ceiling.

Quinn grew up in South London, and through his parents he holds both British and Irish citizenship. He went to Emanuel School in Battersea and then to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and he walked out of drama school almost straight into a lead on BBC One: Arthur Havisham, the resentful brother of Dickens’s jilted bride, in Tony Jordan’s Dickensian, a serial that let the characters of a dozen novels share one London street.

Born in London in 1994, he graduated from LAMDA in 2015, and the stage was where casting directors first saw how precise he could be. At the Royal Court he played in Katherine Soper’s Wish List, a performance that won him the Manchester Theatre Award for best actor in a studio production, and at the National Theatre he was Luke, the troubled teenage son of Olivia Williams‘s physicist and the sparring partner of Olivia Colman‘s aunt, in Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes, directed by Rufus Norris. In 2018 Screen International named him one of its Stars of Tomorrow.

British television, meanwhile, put him in costume, which is what it does with young actors who have a slightly haunted face. He was Leonard Bast, the clerk ground down by class in Kenneth Lonergan’s adaptation of Howards End opposite Hayley Atwell, and Enjolras, the student firebrand at the barricade, in Andrew Davies’s Les Misérables. In Catherine the Great he played Paul, the neglected heir of Helen Mirren‘s empress. Smaller jobs filled the gaps: one episode of Game of Thrones as a Stark soldier, a police officer in Mangrove, the opening film of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, and a feature debut in the war-horror film Overlord, produced by J. J. Abrams.

Eddie Munson changed the scale. Quinn was cast in 2019, shot the fourth season of Stranger Things in 2021 and, when it reached Netflix in 2022, became the breakout of a show already built on breakouts: a long-haired senior who runs the school’s Dungeons & Dragons club, is blamed for a murder he did not commit and gets a guitar solo in the Upside Down that sent Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” back up the charts. He won the MTV Movie & TV Award for best breakthrough performance, picked up a Saturn nomination, signed with CAA and became the face of Dior’s Gris Dior fragrance.

Hollywood answered fast. In Michael Sarnoski’s A Quiet Place: Day One he played Eric, an English law student who attaches himself to Lupita Nyong‘o’s character as the invasion hits New York. Ridley Scott made him Geta in Gladiator II, one half of a pair of sneering brother emperors alongside Fred Hechinger’s Caracalla, in a film led by Paul Mescal. In Warfare, Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland‘s real-time reconstruction of a Navy SEAL operation in Ramadi in 2006, he was one soldier in a platoon with no hero at its centre, and the cast shared the British Independent Film Award for best ensemble. Then came Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, beside Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.

From a distance, that run looks like the ideal ascent from streaming to studio cinema. Up close it shows a pattern that cuts both ways. The roles that reached the biggest audiences have all been shared, and the film in which Quinn carries the most weight is the one the fewest people saw: Hoard, Luna Carmoon’s first feature, which premiered in the Critics’ Week at Venice. He plays Michael, a volatile young man who crashes into the life of the young woman played by Saura Lightfoot Leon, and the pair were nominated together for best joint lead performance at the British Independent Film Awards. Quinn also fed the one storyline he could not control. For two years he teased in interviews that Eddie might return to Stranger Things, until the Duffer brothers said plainly that the character was dead and the actor was too busy. Steady work inside franchises is not the same as a film built around you, and so far nobody has built one around him.

The next twelve months put that pattern under brighter light. Avengers: Doomsday brings Johnny Storm back to cinemas this December, a year ahead of Avengers: Secret Wars. Most of this year, though, Quinn has been in London as George Harrison for Sam Mendes‘s four Beatles films at Sony, with Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr. In September he, Dickinson and Keoghan were photographed restaging the opening chase of A Hard Day’s Night. Each of the four films tells the story from one Beatle’s point of view, and all four are due in cinemas in April 2028.

Harrison is a telling part for an actor in his position: the youngest Beatle, who wrote in the shadow of two famous songwriters and still put “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” on the band’s records. One of Mendes’s four films will be told from his side. For Joseph Quinn, who has spent four years as part of the set, it is the first time a story of this size will be seen through the eyes of the character he plays.