Page 282 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book

Jeremy Bamber is Fox’s biggest role to date CREDIT: NIK HARTLEY
Jeremy Bamber is Fox’s biggest role to date. His career is only a decade old, but since he left the
Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2010, his run of performances has been remarkable both
for his propensity to steal a scene whenever he’s given one, and in his clear aversion to bland roles.

In the West End he took over the lead in Ken Branagh’s Romeo and Juliet, opposite old Guildhall
friend Lily James in 2016, after Richard Madden was injured (the Telegraph called Fox
‘beguiling’), and played Oscar Wilde’s nemesis, Bosie, in David Hare’s Judas Kiss the same year.

On screen he has been androgynous pop star Marilyn in the BBC’s 2010 Boy George
biopic Worried About the Boy, a reckless Hooray Henry in the 2014 film The Riot Club, a
‘conflicted bisexual nympho’ in 2015’s TV series Cucumber, and a Victorian detective in recent
comedy Year of the Rabbit. And now a convicted killer. It’s quite a range.

‘My only interest has been to try not to be boxed into playing a type,’ he says. ‘Someone who looks
like me and sounds like me, and has the surname I have, perhaps it would be easy to do bib-and-
tucker period dramas for the rest of my life. I’m not interested in that.’

You seem to be doing well avoiding too many posh boys, I say. He sighs.

‘I’m trying… but I’m thrilled you think that. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I’m sure there are roles I
want to play that no one would ever cast me as and I understand that.’