Hiran Abeysekera

Hiran Abeysekera is a Sri Lankan actor born in Colombo, where he grew up during the Civil War. His father owned a garage and his mother taught English. Abeysekera received his early education at Nalanda College Colombo. At eighteen, he lost a friend in a tsunami, an experience that redirected his ambitions from medicine toward theatre, a pursuit he described as urgent given that life can end at any second. He obtained a diploma from the Lanka Children's and Youth Theatre Foundation and in 2007 took the lead role in a British Council production of Peter Shaffer's Equus, a performance that allowed him to audition for drama schools in the United Kingdom. He was accepted at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and graduated in 2011.

Abeysekera made his professional stage debut that same year with the English Touring Theatre, playing Valere in Tartuffe. In 2012 he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was cast as Bartholomew in The Taming of the Shrew. He played Peter Pan on the London stage in 2015. Returning to the RSC in 2016, he portrayed Puck in a film adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream screened by the BBC, played Posthumus in a stage production of Cymbeline at the Barbican Theatre in London, and appeared as Horatio in Hamlet. That same year he also appeared in Russell T Davies' A Midsummer Night's Dream. His subsequent stage work included the role of Leonardo da Vinci in Botticelli in the Fire at the Hampstead Theatre and Sunil Sharma in Behind the Beautiful Forevers at the Royal National Theatre.

From 2018 to 2019, Abeysekera portrayed Dash Khan in the Hulu series Find Me in Paris. In 2019 he originated the role of Pi Patel in Lolita Chakrabarti's stage adaptation of Life of Pi at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, earning a UK Theatre Award for the performance. He reprised the role when the production transferred to the Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End in 2021, and in 2022 received the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Play for that performance.

Abeysekera brought the role of Pi Patel to Broadway in 2023, when Life of Pi ran at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York. The production marked his Broadway debut, for which he received the Theatre World Award as well as nominations from the Drama Desk and the Outer Critics Circle. He is scheduled to play the title role in William Shakespeare's Hamlet, directed by Robert Hastie, at the Lyttelton Theatre at the Royal National Theatre from September 25 through November 22, 2025, as part of artistic director Indhu Rubasingham's inaugural season.