Lewis Gribben plays frightened young men by going quiet and letting the camera wait, and in Somewhere Boy that quiet carried eight episodes. Since then he has been one face among many in large productions; we would like to see him given the whole screen again.
Fi1m perspective
Danny stands on a doorstep in Somewhere Boy (2022) with nothing between him and the sky, deciding whether to step out. Most actors would reach for the moment. Gribben does not. He stands tall and folded in on himself, head down, hands at his sides, and Alexandra Brodski's camera holds on him until the stillness becomes the event. We spent much of the first two episodes with a hand near our mouth, and nothing in them was loud; it was because he plays fear by shrinking rather than shouting, and shrinking is harder to watch.
Before Danny he was a face in other people's films: a dealer in T2 Trainspotting (2017), Duncan in Get Duked (2019) alongside Samuel Bottomley, Stevie in Ben Sharrock's Limbo (2020). He has said that Somewhere Boy was him "proving I can be more than 'the prime suspect's son'", and it did. Pete Jackson's series gave him a boy of eighteen who had never been outside, raised by a father (Rory Keenan) who told him monsters waited past the trees, and Gribben built the whole performance out of small, exact choices. The careful, old-fashioned English learned from films made before his father was born. The flinch at a passing car. The habit of answering questions nobody meant to be answered. It is the kind of part that can tip into whimsy, and he never let it.
Since then the work has been bigger and the parts smaller: Sergeant Robert Bixler in Cary Joji Fukunaga's Masters of the Air (2024), Generation Z (2024), an episode of Black Mirror (2025), a regular role in Blade Runner 2099 (2026). We have not reviewed these and will not pretend to judge them. We can say that the type he is being asked for is already set: the young outsider, the one not quite in step with everyone else. That is what he does best, on the evidence, and it is also the trap. An actor who is good at being lost can be cast as lost for a decade.
What we have seen him carry is one thing, and it was enough to make us want more. The test now is a part where the world is strange and he is the one who understands it. We suspect he would be just as still, and just as hard to look away from.
Biography
Lewis Gribben is a Scottish actor from Glasgow. He began acting as a child after his mother took him to youth drama classes at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre. He later performed with the Attic Collective, studied at Glasgow Clyde College and graduated in 2019 with a BA (Hons) in Acting for Stage and Screen from Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh.
Gribben had early supporting roles in films including T2 Trainspotting (2017) and Get Duked! (2019), and television appearances in Deadwater Fell (2020), Shetland (2021) and Silent Witness (2021). He played the lead role of Danny in the Channel 4 series Somewhere Boy (2022), for which he received a Screen Daily Rising Star award and a Scottish BAFTA for Best TV Actor. He has since appeared in Masters of the Air (2024), Black Mirror (2025) and Generation Z (2024), and is a series regular in Blade Runner 2099 (2026).
