Jack Andrew Lowden (born 2 June 1990) is a British actor. Following a four-year stage career, his first major international onscreen success was in the 2016 BBC miniseries War & Peace, which led to starring roles in feature films.
Lowden starred as Eric Liddell in the 2012 play Chariots of Fire in London. In 2014, he won an Olivier Award and the Ian Charleson Award for his role as Oswald in Richard Eyre's 2013 adaptation of Ibsen's Ghosts. In 2013, he began to have substantial roles in British television series and feature films, including The Tunnel (2013) and '71 (2014), and had leading roles in the BBC miniseries The Passing Bells (2014) and War & Peace (2016).
His screen projects since War & Peace have included the title role as golfing legend Tommy Morris in Tommy's Honour (2016), the starring role of Morrissey in the biopic England Is Mine (2017), a main-cast role as an RAF fighter-pilot in Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017), a starring role in the Scottish Highlands thriller Calibre (2018, for which he won the British Academy Scotland Award for Best Film Actor), Lord Darnley in Mary Queen of Scots (2018), a starring role as a plantation owner in 19th-century Jamaica in the 2018 BBC miniseries The Long Song, and Zak "Zodiac" Bevis in the 2019 comedy-drama WWE film Fighting with My Family.
Early life
Lowden was born in Chelmsford, Essex, the son of Gordon and Jacquie Lowden. He grew up in the Scottish village of Oxton. In a 2019 interview, he explained: "I'm an IVF baby. And so is my brother. Down there was one of the few places that was doing it." His younger brother, Calum, became a ballet dancer from a very early age at the Manor School of Ballet in Edinburgh, and later trained at the English National Ballet School and the Royal Ballet School in London; as of 2016, he is a first soloist at the Royal Swedish Ballet. As a child, Jack attended the dance classes at Manor School of Ballet as well, but found he was better at, and more suited to, acting. He has stated that his personal ambition since childhood was actually to be a footballer.
When he was 10, Lowden's parents enrolled him in the Scottish Youth Theatre in Edinburgh. At age 12, he played John in a Peter Pan pantomime at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh. He attended Earlston High School, where he starred as Buddy Holly in Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story and performed in various concerts. His conviction to become a professional actor came from seeing the play Black Watch on its first run in 2007. While in high school, he studied during summer school at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. He also performed regularly at the Galashiels Amateur Operatic Society, where he played the lead in a 2008 production of The Boy Friend. Lowden received a BA in acting from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow in 2011.
