Alex Sharp

Alex Sharp is an English actor, born circa 1988 or 1989, who originated the role of Christopher Boone in the Broadway production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. He is also known to television audiences for his role as Will Downing in the Netflix series 3 Body Problem.

Sharp spent his early childhood traveling through Europe and the American Southwest in a caravan before his family settled in east Devon, England when he was eight years old. His mother, a teacher, and his father, who worked in real estate, homeschooled him with lessons described as both rigorous and unorthodox. He attended Beaminster Comprehensive School in Dorset and later studied Performing Arts at Yeovil College in Yeovil, Somerset. He also performed regional theatre at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter. At eighteen, he left England and traveled to North America, where he worked as a carpenter, handyman, and in call centres in Canada, and at times traveled to Latin America.

While working on a house in Montreal, Sharp resolved to pursue acting professionally. He sought out the best theatre schools and chose the Juilliard School for its location in Manhattan. He auditioned with a scene from Hamlet and, against school rules, also performed a scene from a play he had written himself, presenting it as the work of an obscure English playwright. He was accepted into the Drama Division's Group 43. During his time at Juilliard, he wrote and directed an adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in the summer of 2014.

That autumn, Sharp made his Broadway and professional acting debut in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, playing Christopher Boone, an autistic teenager. His final performance in the production was on September 13, 2015. The role earned him the Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Leading Actor in a Play, a Theatre World Award recognizing his Broadway debut, and the 2014 Logo TV NewNowNext Award for Best New Broadway Lead Actor. As of August 2015, he was the youngest winner of the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play, breaking the record previously held by Harvey Fierstein. He also received a nomination for the Drama League Distinguished Performance Award and a nomination for the Fred and Adele Astaire Award for Outstanding Male Dancer for his work in the same production.

Sharp's film work includes John Cameron Mitchell's How to Talk to Girls at Parties in 2017, in which he appeared alongside Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning, and Ruth Wilson. That same year, he starred with Lily Collins and Keanu Reeves in Marti Noxon's To the Bone, a semi-autobiographical film about eating disorders released on Netflix on July 14, 2017. In 2020, he co-starred as activist Rennie Davis in Aaron Sorkin's The Trial of the Chicago 7, alongside Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In 2022, he appeared in a principal supporting role in Living, directed by Oliver Hermanus from a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro and starring Bill Nighy.