James McArdle

James McArdle is a Scottish actor born on 3 April 1989 in Glasgow, where he grew up in the Darnley neighbourhood and attended St Ninian's High School in Giffnock. As a child he participated in PACE Theatre Company in nearby Paisley and worked as a child actor in films. At seventeen he traveled by bus to London to pursue professional training, gaining acceptance to RADA after initially stumbling over his audition lines before returning to impress the selectors. He departed the course near its end in 2010, the same year he appeared in Macbeth at The Globe, starred in Spur of the Moment by Anya Reiss at the Royal Court Theatre, and took a role in A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev at the Chichester Festival Theatre.

McArdle's early stage career brought him to several prominent British institutions. In 2011 he played Agathon in Henrik Ibsen's Emperor and Galilean at the National Theatre and portrayed Robin Hood in the RSC production of The Legend, adapted by Ella Hickson. The following year he starred as Harold Abrahams in Mike Bartlett's stage adaptation of Chariots of Fire, which opened at the Hampstead Theatre on 9 May 2012 before transferring to the West End on 23 June and running through 5 January 2013. In 2014 he portrayed King James I of Scotland in Rona Munro's King James I, performed at both the National Theatre and the Edinburgh International Festival.

McArdle won the Ian Charleson Award in 2016 for his 2015 performance as Mikhail Platonov in Platonov at the Chichester Festival Theatre. His portrayal of Louis Ironson in Angels in America at the National Theatre Lyttleton in 2017 earned him a nomination for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. In March 2018 he brought that performance to Broadway when the production transferred to the Neil Simon Theatre for an eighteen-week engagement, appearing in both Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Angels in America: Perestroika. His Broadway work that year earned him a Theatre World Award, as well as a nomination for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play.

In 2024 McArdle played the lead role in Four Mothers, an Irish-set comedy adapted from Gianni Di Gregorio's 2008 Italian film Mid-August Lunch. He portrayed a gay young adult fiction writer caring for his widowed mother. The film won the BFI London Film Festival Audience Award in 2024.