Will Poulter

Not many screen careers start as a school project. At the Harrodian in London, a teenage Will Poulter helped turn a classroom performance into 'School of Comedy', a proper British sketch series built on kids playing adults, which he starred in while still doing his homework. Two decades on, that same schoolboy has a Marvel god, an Ari Aster nightmare and two Emmy nominations on his CV.

Born in Hammersmith on 28 January 1993, he is the son of a professor of cardiovascular medicine and a nurse raised in Kenya. School was a struggle: he has spoken openly about growing up with dyslexia and dyspraxia, and about acting being the first thing that made him feel capable. He later tried a drama degree at Bristol, and left after a year because the work kept coming.

It had been coming since he was 14, when he played Lee Carter, the tearaway with a camcorder in Son of Rambow, one of the best loved British indies of its decade, which premiered at Sundance. He followed it as cousin Eustace, a brat who spends half the film as a dragon, in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and a teenage dealer in Wild Bill, Dexter Fletcher's directing debut.

'We're the Millers' and a BAFTA

Hollywood noticed him in 2013 as Kenny, the hapless fake son of the surprise box office hit We're the Millers, a role that won him two MTV Movie Awards, including Best Kiss for his three way scene with Jennifer Aniston and Emma Roberts. Months later the British public voted him the BAFTA Rising Star Award ahead of Lupita Nyong'o and Margot Robbie.

He spent the decade mixing franchises with serious swings: the tormented Gally in The Maze Runner and The Maze Runner: The Death Cure, the young trapper Jim Bridger in The Revenant, the film that finally won its star an Oscar, shot in brutal conditions by Alejandro González Iñárritu with Leonardo DiCaprio, the Netflix satire War machine and the gothic chiller The Little Stranger.

His most uncomfortable work came in 2017: Philip Krauss, the racist patrolman terrorising the Algiers Motel in Detroit, Kathryn Bigelow's account of the 1967 riots, which brought him the best reviews of his career to that point.

'Bandersnatch', 'The Bear' and two Emmy nominations

As Colin Ritman, the visionary programmer whose fate the viewer got to choose in 'Bandersnatch', the interactive Black Mirror film, he met the ugly side of fame: a flood of comments about his looks pushed him to step away from social media for the sake of his mental health, a decision he explained in an admirably plain statement. The film itself won the Emmy for best television movie, and he brought Ritman back in 2025 in 'Plaything', part of the show's seventh series.

In between he was the obnoxious tourist of Midsommar, Ari Aster's daylight nightmare, fronted the video game 'The Dark Pictures: Little Hope', and was briefly cast in Amazon's 'The Lord of the Rings' series before scheduling forced him out.

Television has given him his biggest recent wins. His OxyContin salesman in Dopesick, the opioid crisis drama that won Michael Keaton an Emmy, earned his first nomination, as supporting actor in a limited series. The second, as a guest actor, came for Luca, the Copenhagen trained pastry chef of The Bear, a part he prepared for by training with real pastry chefs. His becalmed Copenhagen scenes became some of that season's most quoted television, and he returned for season four.

Adam Warlock and the Marvel machine

In 2023 James Gunn handed him one of Marvel's most coveted parts: Adam Warlock, the golden being the saga had been promising since a post credits scene in 2017, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Poulter went through months of training for it, then refused to sell the transformation as a lifestyle, warning that superhero body standards are neither realistic nor healthy and that mental wellbeing comes first.

Warfare, unicorns and Boots Riley

The work since has been anything but samey. He was the branding shark circling Nicolas Cage in Dream Scenario, the Korean War veteran husband of Daisy Edgar-Jones in the fifties set melodrama On Swift Horses, premiered at Toronto, with Jacob Elordi, and officer Erik in Warfare, the real time Ramadi ambush recreated almost without music by Alex Garland and veteran Ray Mendoza.

He joined a family that runs over a mythical beast with Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega in the satire Death of a Unicorn, and in 2026 joined the shoplifting crew of I Love Boosters, Boots Riley's absurdist crime comedy, which premiered at South by Southwest to warm reviews.

Off camera he keeps his private life firmly private and puts his platform elsewhere: he is an ambassador for Alzheimer's Research UK and one of his generation's most candid voices on mental health. All this and he only turned 33 in January 2026. And yes, he has heard the one about Sid from 'Toy Story'. He takes it better than anyone.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Will Poulter is Son of Rambow (2007); in all, 20 films and 3 TV shows over 19 years. They have worked as actor in 23 and producer in 1. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010), with 106 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 13 titles. The person they have worked with most is Jack Reynor, on 3 films, among them Midsommar and Detroit.