Steven Cree, the Outlander brother-in-law who finally gets to play the villain

Steven Cree

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	February 29, 1980 Kilmarnock, Scotland
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Maleficent, Brave, John Carter

Most viewers know Steven Cree’s face before they know his name. He is the steady brother-in-law who keeps Lallybroch running while Jamie Fraser goes off to make history in Outlander. He is the weatherman who tells Winston Churchill the sky will not cooperate, and the knight who swears himself to Robert the Bruce. For two decades the Scottish actor has built a career out of standing one step behind the lead and making the lead look braver. This autumn, in an action film called One Last Shot, he is finally the man the hero has to stop.

That change of position is the most interesting thing happening to him right now, because so much of his work has been an argument for the supporting player as the person who holds a story together. Cree tends to play men whose decency is never in question, and the trick of his best scenes is how little he needs to do to make that decency feel earned.

Cree grew up in Kilmarnock, in East Ayrshire, a leap-day child born on 29 February 1980. After secondary school he spent a year at Langside College in Glasgow before winning a place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, the conservatoire now known as the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. A London agent signed him while he was still a student, and he moved south when he finished.

The first decade was a long British apprenticeship. It started with a guest part in the CBBC comedy G-Force in 2001 and continued through single episodes of Doctors, Bad Girls, Holby City and Silent Witness. In 2009 he played the composer himself in Liana Marabini’s Vivaldi, the Red Priest, and he became a regular in Noel Clarke’s films: 4.3.2.1 and Huge in 2010, The Knot in 2012, Brotherhood in 2016. Hollywood arrived in fragments, with a guard in John Carter, the voice of Young Macintosh in Pixar’s Brave and a small part in Maleficent. In 2013 he was Lennox in Kenneth Branagh‘s Macbeth at the Manchester International Festival, a production broadcast to cinemas around the world through NT Live.

Then came Ian Murray. Cast in 2014 in the Starz adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s novels, Cree played the husband of Jenny Fraser and the closest thing Jamie had to a brother, the man who stays behind and keeps the family alive while the hero is away. He appeared across the first four seasons, and he has said himself that he was only in about a dozen episodes over the whole run, yet the show’s fans treated him as if he had never left. The series brought him back for its seventh season, and in the episode “Brotherly Love”, broadcast in November 2024, Ian dies at home in Lallybroch of the cough he had carried since Culloden, holding Jamie’s hand. Viewers in several countries counted it among the hardest farewells the show has staged.

Between those seasons Cree became one of the screen’s reliable faces of Scottish history. In Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill (2017) he played Group Captain James Stagg, the meteorologist whose forecast pushed back the date of the D-Day landings, opposite Brian Cox. In David Mackenzie’s Outlaw King (2018), the Netflix epic with Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce, he was Sir Christopher Seton, Bruce’s brother-in-law. The same year he wrote and starred in a short film, The Little Princess, directed by Jason Maza and funded on Kickstarter, which shared the Best Short Narrative prize at the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival.

Genre work and British television filled the following years. He was Rigby, the border agent pleased to have Sarah Connor in custody, in Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), and Andrew Bentham opposite Richard Gere in the BBC Two thriller MotherFatherSon. In Sky’s COBRA he played Chief Constable Stuart Collier alongside Robert Carlyle, and in the second and third series of A Discovery of Witches he was Gallowglass, the nephew of Matthew Clairmont. In 2023 he took the role of Sam Henderson, a newly arrived Consul General in Barcelona whose conduct turns out to be less clean than his manners, in the Alibi drama The Diplomat.

The pattern has a cost, and it is worth naming. Read in sequence, Cree’s credits are a list of men who serve: brothers-in-law, staff officers, police chiefs, consuls, a Secret Service agent called Crasson in the Amazon action comedy Heads of State. He is rarely the reason a project gets made, and the big studio films in particular have used him as texture, a credible face at the edge of the frame. Even Outlander, the role that defines him, rationed him. Ian was loved partly because he was so often offscreen, a figure fans could fill in for themselves. For an actor this dependable, the open question is whether dependability has been the trap.

The last two years suggest the answer is changing. In Kirk Jones’s I Swear (2025), the Tourette syndrome drama that won Robert Aramayo the BAFTA for best actor, Cree plays David Davidson, the father of campaigner John Davidson. In Apple TV’s Down Cemetery Road, the Mick Herron adaptation, he is Bob Poland, the younger lover of Emma Thompson‘s private investigator Zoë Boehm. He appeared opposite Imogen Poots and Brett Goldstein in All of You, and in the fourth season of HBO’s Industry in February 2026.

The bigger shift came this year. Queen at Sea, Lance Hammer’s dementia drama with Juliette Binoche, Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall, premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2026 and won the Silver Bear Jury Prize; The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it “an almighty comeback” for its director. Cree plays Jonathan Reid. The film opened in British cinemas on 18 September. Four days later came One Last Shot, James Nunn’s third film in the series that began with One Shot, in which Cree is Elliot Carter, a former comrade of Scott Adkins‘s Navy SEAL Jake Harris who has turned against the country they both served.

It is the first time in years that a film has built its plot around what Cree’s character wants rather than whom he stands beside. Queen at Sea opens in the United States on 30 October.