Actors from Bristol will find few places more abundant with work opportunities than their hometown. The city is a major hub for UK film and TV, and it’s home to studios including Channel 4’s Creative Hub, Aardman Animations, BBC Studios Bristol, and The Bottle Yard Studios. Students from prestigious drama schools such as the Bristol Old Vic and the Bristol Institute of Performing Arts engender an evolving atmosphere of artistic innovation. Annual film festivals and several theatres offer fertile ground for emerging performers seeking their big break.
Growing up around so much creativity, it’s small wonder so many actors from Bristol go on to earn global reputations. Here’s how eight Bristol actors made their mark.
1. Adjoa Andoh
Andoh’s accomplishments are legion. She’s a Member of the Order of the British Empire and an associate artist for the Royal Shakespeare Company. She’s walked the boards in roles ranging from Condoleezza Rice in Stuff Happens to Serafina Pekkala in His Dark Materials – both at the National Theatre. She conceived, co-directed, and played Richard II in the UK’s first all-women-of-colour production of the Shakespeare play. And onscreen, she’s beamed into homes as Lady Danbury on Netflix’s Bridgerton.
Bristol born and bred, she was drawn to acting watching Kate Nelligan’s performance in Plenty at Bristol’s Old Vic theatre. “The whole experience of seeing that play led me to understand that something really powerful happens when you act,” Andoh told The Bristol Magazine. “I understood, right then, that I really wanted to be part of that.”
2. Maisie Williams
Williams’ name is inextricably linked with her acclaimed breakthrough as Arya Stark in Game of Thrones, but roles in Doctor Who, Two Weeks to Live, The New Mutants, and Pistol prove she’s no one-trick pony.
Bristol remains her “favourite place on Earth,” and for good reason. It was there that a strong school talent show performance secured the agency representation that led to Thrones, and she’s eager to guide the next generation of Bristol talent.
“A piece of advice [for filming self-tapes] I give a lot…is to take risks,” she told Backstage. “There needs to be something that stands out about you. [Don’t be afraid to] take a really strange risk…and commit to it.”
3. Hannah Murray
Fellow Game of Thrones alum Murray learned the ropes at North Bristol Post 16 Centre and the Bristol Old Vic Young Company, and then secured her first role as Cassie in Skins when Channel 4 put out a casting call for young Bristol actors. She has since earned a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for God Help The Girl in 2014 and a Tribeca Film Festival Jury Award for best actress for Bridgend in 2015.
“The advice I want to give is to be yourself,” Murray told Backstage. “That is what makes you unique – feeling things the way you want to do them and [having] the courage to stick by those ideas and stand up for them. Because people think they know what they want, but they may not know what they want until you give it to them.”
4. Joe Sims
His TV credits include Broadchurch, Free Rein, and Plebs, but Sims ranks among famous Bristol actors more for his voice than his face. He has over 100 radio credits to his name, his own show on BBC Radio Bristol, and voiceover parts in AAA games such as Final Fantasy XVI (2023), Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020), Bloodborne (2015), and Dark Souls II (2014).
Sims credits the Bristol Old Vic Young Company for setting him on that path. “That’s the beauty of Young Company,” he says. “It gives people like me from a council estate an opportunity to be something else, to be something other – and long may that continue for the next 30 years.”
5. Stephen Merchant
Merchant got his first taste of performing standup at Bristol’s Comedy Box. “The first week, I did really well,” he told The Independent. “Then the second week I died on my arse. I realised that standup was not that easy after all.” Fortunately, he wasn’t put off pursuing comedy. Four years later, he was co-writing and starring in The Office alongside Ricky Gervais. The pair went on to write and act in the comedy series Extras, but Merchant is also known for more series roles, including in Logan and Four Lives.
He’s since revisited Bristol to film The Outlaws – which he also co-wrote, co-produced, and stars in – and continues attributing his “overriding passion” for comedy to famous Bristolians (or almost Bristolians) such as Weston-super-Mare’s John Cleese. “He was tall and he was very funny and very British and it’s almost like I thought, Well, if they want tall people from the West Country, I can do that,” he told Bristol Live.
6. Gamba Cole
We can’t mention The Outlaws without highlighting one of its other Bristol-born stars. Cole was already among the most famous people from Bristol after starring alongside Matthew Goode in A Discovery of Witches, Idris Elba in Guerrilla, and Samuel L. Jackson in The Protégé.
But 2021’s Outlaws meant a return to Bristol for Cole – and a chance to work alongside upcoming homegrown talent. “They hired a lot of young Bristolians and they all got to see how a show gets put together,” Cole told The Bristol Magazine. “From the set department to camera operating, they were just absorbing and learning. The creators made a conscious effort to teach; it was great to have them there.”
7. Tuppence Middleton
Bristol-born and Clevedon-raised, Middleton took full advantage of her hometown’s wealth of dramatic opportunities.
“I joined my local theatre group in Clevedon and performed in pantomimes every year,” she told The Bristol Magazine. “I loved it so much that I started to do more of it outside of school. I joined a group called StageCoach, as well as the Bristol Old Vic Youth Theatre, and began to participate more in school plays too. From there it just grew and grew and I became much more interested in film, trying to educate myself as much as possible.”
She subsequently studied at ArtsEd, before early roles lead to her 2014 breakthrough in The Imitation Game. Since then, the 38-year-old has played leading roles in Jupiter Ascending, War & Peace, and The Current War.
8. Cary Grant
Yes, the man the American Film Institute named the second greatest male star of the Golden Age of Hollywood was born Archibald Alec Leach in the Bristol suburb of Horfield. Bitten by the acting bug early, he visited music halls with his father, worked after school at the Bristol Hippodrome, and learnt stilt-walking to join a stage troupe at just 14 years old.
In 1920, the troupe sailed for the US, where he remade himself as Grant and landed iconic roles in 1938’s Bringing Up Baby, 1940’s The Philadelphia Story, and 1959’s North by Northwest. His status as one of Bristol’s most famous exports is immortalised with a life-size bronze statue in Millennium Square.