Rufus Sewell, the perennial screen villain television finally trusted with the lead

Rufus Sewell

Photo: Scott Garfitt / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 29, 1967 Twickenham, London, England
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Father, The Illusionist, The Holiday
Awards	Laurence Olivier

For two decades the film business looked at Rufus Sewell and saw the man the hero has to beat. The dark curls and a stare that can read as wounded or as dangerous kept landing him the rival, the polished cad with a knife behind his back. He calls himself a character actor and once said, flatly, that he did not want to play a baddie again. What finally gave him room was not a film at all. It was television, and a part built on making an exasperating man impossible to dislike.

His father, William John Frederick Sewell, an Australian-born animator, worked on the “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” sequence of the Beatles film Yellow Submarine; his mother, Jo, was a Welsh artist and a classically trained pianist. His parents divorced when he was five, and his father died when he was ten. Sewell has summed up the household in Twickenham, in south-west London, as “a little bit posh and a little bit free school dinners. We were poor, but we had a piano.”

Sewell, who was born on 29 October 1967, left Orleans Park, a Twickenham comprehensive, in 1984 for West Thames College, where a drama teacher sent him off to audition for drama school. He trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and the stage noticed him first. In 1993, at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton, he created Septimus Hodge, the clever, rakish tutor of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. A year later he was Will Ladislaw, the idealistic outsider in the BBC‘s Middlemarch.

Through the 1990s he was attached to leading roles in Shakespeare in Love and Interview with the Vampire, among others, and ended up in neither. The parts he did get sat at the edges: Fortinbras in Kenneth Branagh‘s Hamlet in 1996, then the amnesiac John Murdoch in Alex Proyas’s Dark City in 1998, a film whose reputation has grown with time.

The new decade fixed the image. In Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale, in 2001, he played Count Adhemar, the sneering rival to Heath Ledger’s commoner knight, and critics handed him the film; Elvis Mitchell wrote that he “steals the picture”. More villains followed, in The Legend of Zorro and as the jealous crown prince of The Illusionist, and in The Holiday he was the charming ex who strings Kate Winslet along.

His strongest work of those years happened where the studios were not looking. On BBC One in 2003 he played the restored king in Charles II: The Power and the Passion. In 2006 Stoppard cast him again, as Jan, a Czech rock fan living through two decades of communist rule, in Rock ‘n’ Roll at the Royal Court. The role won him the Laurence Olivier Award for best actor, and when the production reached Broadway in 2007 Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote that his performance became “a palimpsest in which you see all the layers of a single life”. A Tony nomination followed.

The reward, by his own account, was silence. “After I’ve done something that I’m really proud of and I think changes the way I’m perceived, the immediate reaction is: nothing,” he told The Guardian. “After Charles II on TV, Rock’n’Roll on stage, and then Zen, I had the longest spells of unemployment.” Zen, the BBC series that cast him as Michael Dibdin’s Roman detective, was cancelled after three episodes in 2011. So when the lead vampire in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter came along, he admitted he was by then really happy to play a bad guy again. The tidy story of a gifted actor wasted by typecasting leaves out that he complained about the villains and needed them, and that he has stood by work audiences rejected outright: when viewers walked out of Downloading Nancy at Sundance in 2008, he defended the film.

Television changed the arithmetic. From 2015 to 2019 he played John Smith, an American who has climbed to the top of the Nazi hierarchy in an alternate history where the Axis won the Second World War, in Amazon‘s The Man in the High Castle: a devoted father who is also capable of atrocity. In the same stretch he was Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first prime minister and confidant, in ITV’s Victoria. He said the two roles pulled him away from cinema because the television writing seemed better. A single guest turn as Declan Howell, a drunken painter, in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel brought his first Emmy nomination, in 2019.

Film kept him for supporting work: Sid Luft, Judy Garland’s husband, in Judy; Paul, a son-in-law whose cruelty may exist only in a failing mind, in Florian Zeller’s The Father, opposite Anthony Hopkins. In 2024 he took on Andrew, then Duke of York, in Scoop, Netflix‘s drama about the 2019 Newsnight interview.

Then came Hal Wyler. In Netflix’s The Diplomat, created by Debora Cahn, he plays the husband of Keri Russell‘s Kate Wyler, a career diplomat posted to London as US ambassador. Hal is a former star of the foreign service, loosely modelled on Richard Holbrooke, who cannot stop steering from the passenger seat, and Sewell plays his vanity and his brilliance as one muscle. The series, running since 2023, earned him a nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series at the 2026 Primetime Emmys, his second nomination; the award went to Noah Wyle. The fourth season, released on 15 October, finds Hal serving as vice president alongside Allison Janney‘s President Grace Penn, and Kate, double-crossed by the plan the two of them hatched, looking for allies elsewhere.

He has been married three times: briefly, from 1999 to 2000, to the Australian fashion journalist Yasmin Abdallah; to the writer and producer Amy Gardner, with whom he has a son; and, in July 2024 at Manorbier Castle in Pembrokeshire, to the Cuban-American actress Vivian Benitez. He also has a daughter with Ami Komai.

The next stretch is already booked. On 3 December Netflix releases Pride and Prejudice, Dolly Alderton’s six-part adaptation, with Sewell as Mr Bennet opposite Olivia Colman‘s Mrs Bennet and Emma Corrin’s Elizabeth. He leads the cast of Queenstown, an eight-part drama about a wealthy family and its staff at a ski resort, which went into production this year as Netflix’s first original series commissioned in New Zealand. He also plays the CIA’s Moscow station chief, Gus Hathaway, opposite Russell Crowe in Amma Asante’s Cold War thriller Billion Dollar Spy, which still awaits a release date. Mr Bennet, the dry father underestimated until he speaks, may be the most natural fit he has been handed in years.

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Tags: actors, Keri Russell, The Diplomat, Pride and Prejudice, Rufus Sewell, The Man in the High Castle, Tom Stoppard

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