Callum Turner's 7 Best Film & TV Roles (& 2 Upcoming)
Is Callum Turner the busiest actor in Hollywood right now? He sure could be, if he books the biggest gig of his career as the next James Bond.
With some of the world’s major stars appearing across movies like The Odyssey, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Dune: Part Three in 2026 alone, it's probably a matter of perspective, but if you're willing give extra credit for sheer variety then it would be Turner’s to lose.
This year, we've already seen the festival theatrical release of Rosebush Pruning (a flawed but spectacularly audacious satire), Rose of Nevada (an experimental indie movie) and One Night Only (a high concept rom-com that's attracted a lot of attention on social media).
Last month, we also saw the first trailer for Neuromancer, a big budget Apple TV show based on the classic cyberpunk novel, as well as some viral set pics from the upcoming remake of Possession, in which he’s set to star alongside Margaret Qualley. All of this has more or less come in the same year as Turner's Tuscan marriage to Dua Lipa and the ever-present rumours that he’s nailed on to be the next James Bond — and it's still only August.
For Turner newcomers (or dedicated 007 fans), the actor’s back catalogue already boasts a number of titles that more than worth digging into to get a taste of his work. In the list below, which I’ve arranged by order of release date, you’ll find what I think are Turner's seven best roles to date as well as two more to look out for in the next year or so.
It wasn’t exactly Turner’s debut role, but John Boorman’s Queen & Country really gave an enormous boost to Turner's fledgling career when it premiered in Cannes in 2014. The movie is a follow-up to Hope and Glory, the Oscar nominee's autobiographical account of growing up in London during World War II.
Set in the 1950s, Queen & Country follows Turner’s Bill as he’s called up for National service during the Korean War. Like its predecessor, this a deeply personal and nostalgic movie from one of the best British directors of his generation.
Alongside Turner, the movie also boasts a wonderful cast of up-and-coming British stars — including a pre-Crown Vanessa Kirby — as well as veterans like David Thewlis and Richard E. Grant.
Turner followed up that early Boorman collaboration with small roles in Green Room and Victor Frankenstein before landing his next lead in Tramps, a hidden gem rom-com that broke out from the Toronto Film Festival in 2016. If you like a good crime caper with a bit of romance thrown on top (or vice versa, like the recent Carolina Caroline), this one’s a real treat.
The plot follows two strangers (played by Turner and Grace Van Patten) who agree to do something shady in order to earn a bit of cash on the side. Naturally, things go awry, forcing the unlikely couple to spend a day together as they attempt to rectify the situation.
Of course, they end up getting to know each other as they make their way through a nice range of side quests and New York locations.
2016 also saw Turner appear in a starry and widely acclaimed BBC adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Again, the cast boasts a number of fledgling British and Irish stars, including Lily James, Jessie Buckley, Jack Lowden and Tom Burke — alongside industry heavyweights like Paul Dano, Brian Cox and Gillian Anderson.
War and Peace chronicles the lives of a group of Russian aristocrats in the 19th century, during Napoleon's attempted invasion. Turner plays Anatole Kuragin, a rich, handsome, and reckless officer — or in other words, one of the juiciest characters in the book.
Given Turner’s classic good looks and general vibe, it’s not surprising that he’s popped up in a wide range of period dramas in his career. One of the best is Emma., a 2020 adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel that's set in the appropriate time period but which also gives the story a distinctly modern energy. If you’re a fan of Clueless (which was also based on the Austen classic), you’ll want to check this one out.
The movie stars Anya Taylor-Joy (who earned a Golden Globe nomination for her lead performance as the happy-go-lucky and ever watchful socialite) alongside Turner as Frank Churchill, another handsome aristocrat type, in a cast that also features Josh O’Connor and Mia Goth.
In 2025, Turner continued his run of unconventional rom-coms with Eternity, a genuinely Capraesque A24 movie about reconnecting with your soulmate in the afterlife. The movie, which has great fun with the endless possibilities of purgatory, was released to strong reviews last year but I think it went a little under the radar at the time.
Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller star as a long-married couple who meet after both pass away, only to find that a previous boyfriend (Turner) who died young has been waiting there for decades to reunite with her.
Rose of Nevada is the latest from director Mark Jenkin — a filmmaker with an incredibly specific and localised style. Jenkin announced himself as a director to watch in 2019 with Bait, a Kermode-approved movie about gentrification in an English fishing village that was shot using old windup cameras and developed by the director himself in order to achieve the grainy, handmade texture of a much older film — an approach that perfectly counterpointed and complimented the movie’s contemporary themes.
Much of that style is on show in Rose of Nevada, only here Jenkin shoots in colour and throws in more than a dash of folksy mythology for good measure. Turner stars alongside George MacKay as two young fishermen who agree to captain the titular boat. When they return from their first outing, they discover that some local superstitions are better founded than others.
Turner’s latest movie is called One Night Only and it’s another in the Turner repertoire of off-beat romantic comedies. This one takes place in a world where pre-marital sex is only allowed for one night of the year — imagine if The Purge was a dystopian date movie and you’ll have some idea of what’s in store.
The concept could maybe have been thought through a little better, but it's hard to complain when actors as likeable as Turner and Monica Barbaro are bringing this much chemistry to the screen.
Filmmakers have been trying to make a movie based on William Gibson's Neuromancer since at least the 1980s but no one ever quite managed to get it over the line.
The closest thing we’ve had to an adaptation thus far has been The Matrix, a movie that took Gibson’s ideas about cyberpunks (a term he basically coined) and “jacking in” and ran with them — just as movies like Ghost in the Shell to Inception have done, too.
Now a proper adaptation of the book is finally on the way at Apple TV and it already looks slick as hell. The story is essentially a dystopian heist movie that follows a hacker named Case (Turner) as he’s enlisted to unlock and merge two A.I.s. Look out for it next year.
At time of writing, it looks certain that Turner will follow up that much anticipated adaptation with a potentially precarious remake of one of European cinema’s most sacred texts: Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 classic, Possession.
Żuławski’s West Berlin-set, Lovecraftian sci-fi horror is basically untouchable in the eyes of most cinephiles, so the knives might already be out for this one (not least after the recent passing of Sam Neill, who starred in the original alongside an unforgettable Isabelle Adjani).
The good news is that Turner is set to star alongside Margaret Qualley under the direction of Parker Finn, the highly talented creator of the Smile franchise. With names like that involved, I think we should give this Possession remake the benefit of the doubt for now.
