From Billy Elliot to Peaky Blinders, 5 Essential Jamie Bell Roles (and 5 to Look Out For)

When it comes to Bell, there’s only ever going to be one place to start, and that’s Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot — a phenomenally successful British indie (comparable to movies like Pride and The Full Monty) that took Daldry and his cast and crew all the way to the 2001 Academy Awards.

The joyful and deeply affecting movie saw Bell (who was plucked from thousands of boys who had tried out for the role) play the youngest son of a mining family in the North East of England who discovers an unlikely passion for ballet during the darkest days of the Thatcher years. Bell (who was 13 during filming) went on to become the youngest ever winner of the BAFTA for Best Actor — a record that still stands. It wasn’t a bad speech, either. 

Despite the success of Billy Elliot, the road from child discovery to adult career is rarely smooth (especially for actors from working-class areas), and it took some years before Bell found his place in the industry. 2005’s The Chumscrubber saw him take on his first mature leading role before popping up with supporting turns in Hollywood movies like King Kong, Jumper and Flags of Our Fathers. Then, in 2011, the next biggie came along. 

That film was Peter Jackson and Stephen Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, a mo-capped adaptation of Hergé’s iconically quiffed world explorer in which Bell provided the voice and movements (if not the face) of the story’s hero. The typically Spielbergian adventure was well received and became a modest hit, but plans for a franchise never came to fruition. At the time of writing, a potential sequel is still in the mix with Bell still very much attached — but probably best not to hold your breath on that one.

It’s difficult to say if the fizzling out of the Tintin franchise had anything to do with it, but something seemed to change in the actor in the years that followed. In 2013, he returned to the screen with a lot more muscle, a more imposing gait, and three movies that seemed to suggest a change of approach. 

The first was Snowpiercer, Bong Joon-ho’s English language debut; the second was Filth, an Irvine Welsh adaptation that saw Bell play the partner of a deeply crooked and misogynistic police officer; and then came Nymphomaniac Vol. 2 — a movie that basically does what it says on the tin.

Positioned as Danish provocateur Lars Von Trier’s (the man behind Dancer in the Dark and Melancholia) magnum opus and told through a series of darkly comic and increasingly sordid vignettes, this was the movie that saw Bell play the dominant half of a BDSM pairing with Charlotte Gainsberg’s sex-addicted protagonist. It was, let’s say, a vibe shift. 

If there were any questions around why Bell was doing all that bulking up, it became a little clearer in 2014 when it was announced that the once twinkle-toed star had been cast to play Ben Grimm (aka The Thing) in Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four, a movie with a famously troubled production that was an even worse disaster upon release — with critics and fans disowning it faster than you could say “Flame on!” 

It is still, I would argue, an essential film in Bell’s career — if you combine it with the disappointment of the Tintin franchise, his move away from Hollywood in the last decade starts to look quite understandable indeed.

It’s true, the last ten years of Bell’s career contain far fewer widely seen films than the first 15, but there are a few that’re certainly worth a watch. Skin, a movie about white supremacists that was released in 2018, further showcased the actor’s willingness to take on extreme roles, and he did a great Bernie Taupin alongside Taron Egerton’s Elton John in Rocketman in 2019. 

For me, Bell’s best performance in the last ten years was his touching portrayal of the protagonist’s father in (45 Years-director) Andrew Haigh’s All of us Strangers, an adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s novel that boasted remarkable performances across the board, especially from Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott. At various points in the story, Scott’s character returns to the village he grew up in to talk to the ghosts of his parents (Bell and Claire Foy), who died in a car crash decades earlier. The scene where he finally gets to come out to them, all those years later, is impossibly moving.

The current project on Bell’s roster is Half Man, Richard Gadd’s hotly anticipated follow-up to his 2024 phenomenon, Baby Reindeer. A co-production from the BBC and HBO, the first of the miniseries’ six episodes landed on iPlayer on April 24.

The show centres on two men (Gadd and Bell) who grew up together and now consider each other brothers, at least before falling out at a wedding. It begins at that moment before jumping back and forth in time, much in the way that Gadd told his incredible story in Baby Reindeer. Expect an exploration of toxic masculinity and trauma from the first episode.

The next Bell feature that will soon be with us is Karim Aïnouz’s Rosebush Pruning, a movie I saw at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year — and while I wouldn’t say that I necessarily enjoyed it, I do think it’s grimly worth seeing. 

Set in gorgeous Catalonia and based on a script by Yorgos Lanthimos’ regular screenwriter, Efthimis Filippou, the story focuses on an impossibly wealthy and impossibly depraved family whose only joys in life appear to come from incestuous flirting and fashion. Bell plays one of the four siblings: a character who is meant to be the relatively decent one, although I don’t recall seeing much evidence of that. 

Regardless, the chance to see actors like Elle Fanning, Pamela Anderson and Tracy Letts deliver dialogue like this should not be slept on.

When Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man ended, the question on everyone’s lips was whether Barry Keoghan would reprise his role as Tommy’s eldest son, Duke Shelby. With Keoghan now off the franchise, that task has gone to Jamie Bell in the as-yet-untitled Peaky Blinders Sequel Series.

Set in the 1950s, a decade after the events of the movie, the two-part series (which will each contain six episodes) is set to follow the Shelby family’s operations in Birmingham in the aftermath of WWII. Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things and Lashana Lynch (Day of the Jackal) will lead the supporting cast. 

The last properly-in-development project on Bell’s upcoming slate at the moment is Paul Greengrass’ The Uprising, a historical epic about a 14th-century peasant revolt in plague-era England that will likely be with us at some point next year. It will mark the three-time Bourne director’s first period movie since the Tom Hanks Western, News of the World. 

Naturally, we don’t know a great deal more than that at the time of writing, but we do know that Bell currently has top billing in a cast that also features Thomasin McKenzie, Andrew Garfield and Cosmo Jarvis. If we are looking at a potential ‘Jamiessance’ in the next few years, the success of this film and Peaky Blinders will have a lot to do with it. 

In a pleasing full circle moment, it looks as if Bell is set to put his dancing shoes back on to play Fred Astaire, the Golden Age movie star, in an upcoming biopic from screenwriter Arash Amel (who penned The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare).

As the title (Fred & Ginger) suggests, the movie will centre on Astaire’s working relationship with Ginger Rogers, with whom he sang and danced his way through ten hugely successful movies in the 1930s and 1940s. No word yet on who’s being eyed to play Rogers, but you can colour me intrigued.