Tom Francis, the stage actor who walked out of the theatre and into the Bond rumours

Tom Francis

Photo: Locust Valley / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 29, 1999 Colchester, Essex, England
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Jay Kelly
Awards	Laurence Olivier · Theatre World

For the better part of two years, Tom Francis left the building halfway through his own show. In Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-back revival of Sunset Boulevard, the second act began with a handheld camera following his Joe Gillis out of the theatre, past the Savoy in London and later through Shubert Alley in New York, where he sang the title number among passers-by and tourists before walking back inside to finish it, the whole trip relayed live onto the stage. The sequence lasted about six minutes and became the production’s calling card. It also framed the question his career is now answering in public: what happens when the camera stops being a stage effect and becomes the job itself?

His birth name is Thomas Francis Barber, and the stage name simply drops the surname. He was born in Colchester and grew up in Thorpe Morieux, a small village in Suffolk, and the route out ran through the youth theatre at the Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds and a local singing group called Voice Squad. From there he went to Arts Educational Schools in west London to train in musical theatre.

He was born on 29 June 1999, which put his graduation in 2020, the year British theatres went dark. His professional debut came that same year anyway, as Roger Davis in Rent at Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester under the director Luke Sheppard, a production that also circulated as a filmed version. In 2021 he sang Claude in a concert staging of Hair at the London Palladium, stepping in for Jordan Luke Gage, and in March 2022 Sheppard brought him back to take over as Romeo in & Juliet at the Shaftesbury Theatre, his West End debut. Credits at Birmingham Rep in What’s New Pussycat and at the Garrick in I Could Use a Drink filled out the picture of a working musical-theatre lead whose name meant most to the people who wait at stage doors.

Then Lloyd cast him opposite Nicole Scherzinger. The director emptied Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of its mansion and its grand staircase, played it on a bare black stage against walls of live video, and handed Francis a Joe Gillis who tells the story of his own death. The revival opened at the Savoy Theatre in 2023, and at the Olivier Awards in April 2024 it took seven prizes, Best Musical Revival among them. Scherzinger was named Best Actress in a Musical, and Francis won Best Actor in a Musical.

Broadway followed that autumn at the St. James Theatre, with Francis making his New York debut in the same role. The run brought him a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Musical, nominations from the Drama Desk and the Drama League, and a Theatre World Award for an outstanding debut, while the production itself won the Tony for Best Revival of a Musical. He gave his last performance as Joe on 6 July 2025, two weeks before the Broadway run ended, and handed the part to the ensemble member Pierre Marais.

The usual telling of that run is a clean ascent, and it skips the cost. In November 2024, weeks into the Broadway engagement, a vocal injury forced him out of the show for a period; the number that made his name was sung outdoors and on the move, night after night. There is also a quieter problem in how the performance gets read. Lloyd’s camera was a live feed inside a theatre, watched by an audience that knew he was a few streets away at most and would be back through the door in minutes. That proximity did much of the work. It let casting directors imagine him on screen, yet nothing he did as Joe Gillis has been tested without it.

The imagining has run ahead of the record. By May 2026 his screen work amounted to a recurring role as Clayton in the fifth and final season of Netflix‘s You, released in April 2025, and a small part as an actor at an audition in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. That month Variety reported that he had auditioned to play James Bond in Amazon MGM’s new film under Denis Villeneuve, which made him the first actor publicly reported to have tested for a search that has produced far more headlines than facts. Asked about it at Variety’s Power of Women event in London, he neither confirmed nor denied it: “I think everyone in the U.K. grows up watching James Bond and wanting to play him. It’s such a great franchise.” Pressed on what he would bring to the part, he said, “I feel like I have to audition to be in that position to even start thinking about it.”

The real screen test is arriving now. In Peter Berg’s The Mosquito Bowl, adapted from Buzz Bissinger’s book about the football game that US Marines played on Guadalcanal on Christmas Eve 1944, Francis plays Dave Schreiner, Wisconsin’s All-American end and a College Football Hall of Fame inductee who was later killed on Okinawa. He shares the four leads with Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgård and Ray Nicholson. The film opened in a limited run in US cinemas on 30 October 2026 and reaches Netflix on 25 November. It is his first lead role on screen, and a period war drama that ends with a real man’s death leaves little room for the stage-door charm that carried Sunset Boulevard.

Television comes next. Apple TV has cast him in a recurring role in The Off Weeks, an eight-episode limited series led by Ben Stiller and Jessica Chastain and directed by Michael Showalter, with Alissa Nutting as showrunner; Francis plays the son of Jonathan, the character Richard Gere plays. Apple has not dated the series, and Amazon has not named its new 007. Whatever happens with Bond, the first verdict lands on 25 November, when The Mosquito Bowl reaches viewers who never stood in Shubert Alley and they find out whether the man who sang his way down the street can hold a close-up.

Tags: actors, Peter Berg, The Mosquito Bowl, Jay Kelly, Tom Francis, You

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