Dominic Cooper

Dominic Edward Cooper, born June 2, 1978, in Greenwich, London, is an English actor whose career spans stage, film, and television across both British and American productions. The son of Julie Cooper, a nursery school teacher, and Brian Cooper, an auctioneer, he grew up in Greenwich and attended John Ball Primary School in Blackheath before moving on to Thomas Tallis School in Kidbrooke. He trained in Professional Acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, graduating in 2000. Cooper has two brothers, Simon and Nathan, the latter a musician with the band The Modern, as well as a half-brother, James, and a half-sister, Emma. His maternal great-grandfather, E. T. Heron, was a film enthusiast who published The Kinematograph Weekly.

Cooper made his stage debut in 2001 in Mother Clap's Molly House at the National Theatre. Early in his career he took on roles with both the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, including the lead role of Will Parry in the National Theatre's adaptation of the His Dark Materials trilogy. His most significant stage work came through Alan Bennett's The History Boys, in which he originated the role of Dakin from the play's first reading in 2004. The production transferred to Broadway in 2006, where Cooper's performance earned him a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play. The History Boys also toured to Sydney, Wellington, and Hong Kong, and Cooper appeared in both the radio and film adaptations of the work.

In 2008, Cooper appeared as Sky in the film Mamma Mia!, performing several songs in the role, and opposite Keira Knightley as Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey in The Duchess. The following year he appeared in An Education and Freefall, and played Hippolytus in Phèdre at the National Theatre alongside Helen Mirren and Margaret Tyzack. In 2010 he played rock drummer Ben in Tamara Drewe, and in 2011 took on the dual lead roles of Latif Yahia and Uday Hussein in The Devil's Double, as well as portraying Milton H. Greene in My Week with Marilyn.

Cooper entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2011, playing a young Howard Stark in Captain America: The First Avenger. He reprised the role in the Marvel One-Shot Agent Carter and subsequently in the ABC television series Agent Carter, which ran in 2015 and 2016. In 2012 he appeared as vampire Henry Sturges in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and in 2014 portrayed the main antagonist Dino Brewster in Need for Speed and Mehmed in Dracula Untold. That same year he played Ian Fleming in the television miniseries Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond. In 2015 he appeared in Miss You Already and The Lady in the Van, directed by Nicholas Hytner, who had previously directed Cooper in both the stage and film versions of The History Boys. Cooper co-starred in the 2016 film Warcraft and that same year began playing Jesse Custer, the lead role in AMC's Preacher, a series that ran through 2019. Also in late 2016, he starred in a West End revival of Stephen Jeffreys' 1994 play The Libertine at the Haymarket Theatre, taking on the role of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. He reprised his role of Sky in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again in 2018.

Cooper shared a flat with actor James Corden, his co-star in The History Boys, and introduced Corden to his future wife, Julia Carey. He is the godfather of Corden's first child, Max. Cooper dated his Mamma Mia! co-star Amanda Seyfried from 2008 to 2009. He was in a relationship with Irish actress Ruth Negga from 2010 to 2016, having first met her on the set of Phèdre in 2009; the two appeared together in the short film Hello Carter, the film Warcraft, and Preacher. He has been in a relationship with actress Gemma Chan since 2018.