The 8 Best Robert Aramayo Movies & TV Shows, Ranked
If your algorithm is anything like mine, your social media feed on the morning after this year’s BAFTAs was likely wall-to-wall with images of Robert Aramayo beaming from the stage of London’s Royal Festival Hall.
It was a face of genuine disbelief, the kind you don’t often see so late in awards season, having nudged past the likes of Timothée Chalamet, Michael B Jordan and Leonardo DiCaprio to become the shock winner of the Best Actor award.
The historic moment was, I imagine, especially puzzling for American audiences, not to mention his fellow nominees, not least when you consider that Aramayo won for Kirk Jones’ I Swear, a movie that had still to be released anywhere in the United States and, as a result, had not been in contention at any other precursor ceremony. Needless to say, the Hull-born grandson of a Spanish fisherman quickly became the hero of the British Academy’s big night.
In truth, even though that prize was a little ahead of schedule, there has recently been a sense with the actor that such things can not be too far away. Indeed, as anyone who's been following Aramayo’s career in the last few years will tell you, the idea that the BAFTAs would eventually garland him has felt less like an “if” than an “when”. And so, with that all still fresh in the memory and I Swear now available to stream on Netflix and JustWatch TV, what better time to look back over the young actor’s career so far and round up his most important roles, which I’ve listed below, naturally, in some kind of ascending order.
Read on to learn a bit more about each one and use the guide below to find out where to stream them on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
For Aramayo, 2016 turned out to be a very significant year. The actor, who was around 23-years-old at the time, had been making a splash on the UK theatre scene since leaving high school but then, all at once, he landed a small but significant part in Game of Thrones (more on that shortly) and another in Tom Ford’s sophomore feature, Nocturnal Animals — a must watch for any fan of the legendary fashion designer’s heartbreaking debut, A Single Man.
The movie, for which Michael Shannon was nominated for an Oscar, is a neo-noir that follows an art gallery owner (played by Amy Adams) on a journey down some of her darker memory lanes. Though appearing in only a handful of moments as Turk, Aramayo gave a small but memorable performance.
David Fincher’s Mindhunter, I think it’s fair to say, is one of the best achievements in the history of Netflix’s original shows. So high are the crime series’ production values that the show, at its best, can feel like a companion piece to Zodiac and Se7en — the director’s two great masterpieces thus far in the crime genre.
Everything about the show feels delicately chosen, and not least of all the cast of actors — many of whom, like Damon Herriman, Oliver Cooper and Aramayo himself, only appear for an episode or two in their roles as infamous serial killers. For his part as Elmer Wayne Henley, Aramayo gives a performance that mixes intensity with worrying restraint.
Looking back on it now, Matthew Vaughn’s 2021 prequel to his wildly successful Kingsman movies — which was inventively titled The King’s Man — boasts a remarkable mix of up-and-coming British actors and all-time greats. Ralph Fiennes, of course, stars as Orlando Oxford, the founder of the spy brotherhood, but the cast also finds room for Rhys Ifans, Tom Hollander, Daniel Brühl, Djimon Hounsou, Charles Dance and Harris Dickenson.
Coming just before his big break in Behind Her Eyes, The King’s Man was not exactly a big break for the actor, but he still managed to shine, if only in a peripheral role.
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Aramayo might have only appeared in a couple of scenes as the young Lord Eddard Stark in the later seasons of Game of Thrones, but his performance was enough to leave some sections of the fanbase pining for him to return in a full Ned prequel show.
Looking great in a patchy beard and a strawberry blond wig, the handful of scenes allowed Aramayo to play the hero in what was likely one of the most re-watched and pored-over sequences in the show's history: a flashback that nodded towards the greatest mystery in George R.R. Martin’s seven book saga — yet the question it really left us with was, “who is this guy and where else can we see him?”
Last year, the London Film Critics circle awarded Aramayo the award for breakout performer for his work on both I Swear and the timely historical film Palestine 36. Directed by Annemarie Jacir, the film covers the 1936 Arab revolt against British colonial rule in a way to suggest that the echoes of those events are still reverberating in the region today.
Aramayo stars as Captain Orde Wingate, a British officer, in a cast that also features Jeremy Irons, Haim Abbas (Succession) and fellow Thrones alum Liam Cunningham.
For me, the Aramayo performance that really made me sit up and take note was his supporting turn in the Netflix limited series Behind Her Eyes — a psychological thriller that just so happens to boast one of the best TV twists of the last decade.
The cast is led by a similarly impressive Eve Hewson (who may be about to have her own breakout year in 2026 thanks to her upcoming part in Disclosure Day) but it’s Aramayo’s Rob — the friend Hewson’s single mother makes while in rehab — that ends being the show’s secret weapon.
If, like me, you’re refusing to let go of your Rings of Power stock just yet, you’ve likely already spent the last few years telling people to stop worrying too much about the show's coherence and just enjoy the production values and the cast.
A lot about Rings of Power has been admittedly unsatisfying so far, but when it comes together there’s kind of nothing on TV right now that looks or feels like it. Yet even when it’s bad, Morfydd Clark’s performance as Galadrial, Owain Arthur’s as Durin, and Aramayo’s endearing turn as Elrond, amongst others, have always kept me watching. I’ll continue to do so.
Even without the strange things that happened on BAFTA night, I Swear would have easily ended up at the top of this list. The film is a UK indie crowd pleaser of the old school: the kind of funny, heartwarming, lightly provocative, but fundamentally political movie (think The Full Monty, Billy Elliot, Pride) that British filmmakers have always seemed to excel at.
The film is a biopic of John Davidson, a man who was diagnosed with Tourette's as a young man but went on to become a campaigner for public awareness later in life, the movie is an unsentimental slice of life that offers viewers a front row seat to the challenges and the moments of joyful solidarity that Davidson experienced growing up in 1980s Scotland. It probably goes without saying, but Aramayo is phenomenal.
