Mark Dexter

Mark Lee Dexter, born on 21 April 1973 in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England, is an English actor whose career has spanned stage, film, and television across the United Kingdom and the United States. As a teenager, he became an early member of the Central Junior Television Workshop in Nottingham, an association that led to early television work before he relocated to London to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He graduated from RADA in 1995.

Dexter's professional stage career began with notable productions of Tennessee Williams plays. Immediately following his graduation, he appeared as Jim O'Connor in Sam Mendes's production of The Glass Menagerie at the Donmar Warehouse, a staging that received the Olivier Award in 1995. He subsequently joined Trevor Nunn's production of Williams's previously unproduced play Not About Nightingales, which originated at the National Theatre in London before transferring to the Circle in the Square Theatre on Broadway in 1999. The production received the Tony Award, marking Dexter's sole Broadway credit to date.

Following his stage work, Dexter shifted his focus predominantly to film and television. Between October 2008 and January 2009, he made eight appearances on the NBC miniseries Crusoe, playing the recurring role of Samuel Tuffley across the twelve-part production. He returned to the stage in 2009, first at the National Theatre in London, where he played Robin Conway in Rupert Goold's production of J. B. Priestley's Time and the Conways, and then at the Old Vic, where he appeared alongside Kevin Spacey in Trevor Nunn's revival of Inherit the Wind, portraying the cynical journalist E. K. Hornbeck, a character based on H. L. Mencken.

During the first half of 2010, Dexter took on the recurring role of businessman Paul Stokes in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street. The following year he played Count Skriczevinsky in Trevor Nunn's production of Flare Path at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, and appeared in a lead role in the feature film Blooded, directed by Ed Boase and released in 2011.

Dexter has become particularly recognized for his portrayals of real political and historical figures. In October 2014 it was announced he would play British Prime Minister David Cameron in Coalition, a Channel 4 political drama broadcast on 28 March 2015. In April 2015, he reprised the role of Cameron in Peter Morgan's play The Audience at the Apollo Shaftesbury Avenue, directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Kristin Scott Thomas as Queen Elizabeth II; in the same production he also played former Prime Minister Tony Blair. He later portrayed Tony Benn in the Netflix drama The Crown in 2019, and played John Dean in Charles Ferguson's 2018 series Watergate. He also appeared as a fictional UK Prime Minister in the 2017 film Transformers: The Last Knight.

Among his other screen credits, Dexter appeared in two episodes of Doctor Who in 2008, playing Dad in the episodes Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead, and returned to the series in 2020 to portray computing pioneer Charles Babbage in the episode Spyfall. In 2012 he played Howard Rimmer, Arnold Rimmer's brother, in the Red Dwarf episode Trojan. He portrayed Sir Arthur Donaldson, the principal villain, in the opening episode of the BBC Victorian crime drama Ripper Street, broadcast in December 2012 in the UK and January 2013 in the United States via BBC America. He played Sir Ernest Shackleton in episode nine of the ITV series Mr Selfridge in March 2013, and appeared as CIA Agent Marlow in 24: Live Another Day, broadcast in the US and UK in spring 2014.

Dexter is also known to British audiences for his role as Timothy Gray in the ITV crime drama The Bletchley Circle, set in the 1950s and broadcast between 2012 and 2014, in which he appeared opposite Anna Maxwell Martin. He was cast as SS Commander Dietrich in the World War II drama The Exception, directed by David Leveaux, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2016 and the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2017 before its general release in June 2017. In 2020, he joined the cast of the HBO finance drama Industry, playing Hilary Wyndham throughout the first season. Earlier film appearances include From Hell in 2001, in which he played Albert Sickert and Prince Edward Albert Victor, and Nicholas Nickleby in 2002, in which he played Young Ralph Nickleby.