Tom Sturridge

Thomas Sidney Jerome Sturridge was born on 5 December 1985 in Lambeth, London, the son of director Charles Sturridge and actress Phoebe Nicholls. One of three children, he has a sister, Matilda Sturridge, who is also an actress. His maternal grandfather is actor Anthony Nicholls, and his great-grandfather is photojournalist Horace Nicholls. Sturridge was educated at The Harrodian School in Barnes, South West London, where fellow pupils included Robert Pattinson, Will Poulter, and George MacKay. He subsequently attended Winchester College, an independent boarding school in Winchester, Hampshire, between 1999 and 2001, where he was a resident of House E, known as Morshead's.

Sturridge began performing as a child, appearing in the 1996 television adaptation of Gulliver's Travels, which was directed by his father and co-starred his mother. He returned to screen work in 2004 with roles in Vanity Fair and Being Julia, followed by a 2005 appearance in the BBC4 production A Waste of Shame, in which he played William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke. In 2006, he took on the role of Nigel in the psychological thriller Like Minds, opposite Eddie Redmayne. That same year, he was originally cast in the lead role of the science-fiction film Jumper but was replaced by Hayden Christensen two weeks before filming began. In 2009, he appeared as Carl in Richard Curtis's comedy The Boat That Rocked, alongside Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. He later played a character loosely based on poet Allen Ginsberg in Walter Salles's 2012 film adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

Sturridge made his stage debut in September 2009 in Simon Stephens's Punk Rock at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, portraying a character loosely modeled on the teenage killers at Columbine High School. The performance earned him a nomination for Most Outstanding Newcomer at the 2009 Evening Standard Awards and a win in the same category at the 2009 Critics' Circle Theatre Awards. He received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in 2016 for his work in a West End revival of American Buffalo.

Sturridge made his Broadway debut in 2013, appearing in Orphans as Phillip, a developmentally disabled character. The role earned him both a Theatre World Award and a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play. In 2017, he starred as Winston Smith in the Broadway production of 1984. He returned to Broadway in 2019 to star alongside Jake Gyllenhaal in Sea Wall/A Life, a production that brought him a second Tony Award nomination for Best Leading Actor in a Play.

Beyond the stage, Sturridge was confirmed in January 2021 to play Dream of the Endless, also known as Lord Morpheus, in the Netflix fantasy series The Sandman. The show's author, Neil Gaiman, stated in a May 2022 interview that he had personally reviewed approximately fifteen hundred auditions for the role and that Sturridge had been among the likeliest candidates from within the first ten auditions. The series ran from 2022 to 2025. In his personal life, Sturridge was in a relationship with actress Sienna Miller from 2011 to 2015; their daughter was born in July 2012. He has been in a relationship with Alexa Chung since July 2022.