Starting 2025 with an abundance of substance and style, we bring together five of the most exciting actors of the moment, shining the spotlight on their conversation-starting, zeitgeist-shaping projects. As they unite in an east London restaurant, we sit down with them to hear about their career highs, passion projects and future ambitions.

“There was a mutiny…” Billy Howle is describing the moment that producers told the cast of The Perfect Couple – Nicole Kidman, Dakota Fanning, Eve Hewson, Liev Schreiber et al – that they would be performing a Saturday Night Fever-meets-“Macarena” dance routine for the show’s opening credits. “Absolute uproar on the group WhatsApp,” he laughs.

The dance perfectly set the tone for last summer’s The White Lotus-level-hyped murder mystery though, in which Howle starred as Benji, the middle son of the Waspish couple Greer (Kidman) and Tag (Schreiber), whose wedding is derailed when a dead body washes up on shore.

“Susanne Bier [the show’s creator] called me and said, ‘I’m tired of seeing you tear yourself apart on screen. Come and do [The Perfect Couple].’ The timing was interesting because I’d just had a conversation with my agent and said something glib like, ‘I’m pretty sure I used to be funny... and then this opportunity came along.’”

Indeed, Howle has a knack for playing complicated characters. Over the past few years, he has portrayed a bereaved Mormon, desperate to avenge the murder of his wife (in Under The Banner Of Heaven alongside Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones), a traumatised playwright (The Seagull with Annette Bening) and a rage-prone newlywed (On Chesil Beach alongside Saoirse Ronan). He also recently wrapped up a sell-out run of John Osborne’s play Look Back In Anger at London’s Almeida Theatre, for which his performance of the disaffected protagonist Jimmy Porter won critical acclaim.

“I’ve always been drawn to extremes,” he says, explaining his pull towards knottier roles. “There are parts of our shared humanity that are difficult to make sense of a lot of the time and storytelling can do so many things: challenge, provoke, heal... If there’s a sort of continual through line in why I became an actor, it’s that.”

For someone known as a time-travelling superhero, Tosin Cole is unexpectedly down to earth. The US-born, London-raised actor plays Michael in Supacell – Rapman’s critically acclaimed Netflix series that follows the lives of five “ordinary” people who discover they have superpowers.

The show was filmed in south London, where Cole has spent most of his life. That was a big attraction. “It was a full circle moment,” he says. “I knew lots of real-life examples of each character.”

Confirmed for a second season, Supacell has been widely praised for challenging stereotypes associated with the Black British experience. “It makes people feel seen,” Cole says. “When I started out, there weren’t many things like this that I could see myself represented in, or that I could hope to be a part of. It was only American stuff. But this was so close to home.”

Last year felt like a turning point for Cole: the actor also took to the stage in Benedict Lombe’s Shifters, with Heather Agyepong. He enjoys theatre and TV for different reasons: “In theatre, everything is so present, there are no take twos,” he says. “You make a mistake, and you just have to roll with it and sometimes that’s magic in itself, as your performance gets to evolve. With film, for the same reason, you learn the importance of time: you feel like it’s against you sometimes.”

He also wrapped filming on Three Bags Full, a “sheep detective” comedy mystery that will hit the big screen in 2026, with a stellar cast including Hugh Jackman and Emma Thompson. In a career with so many highlights already, Cole finds it hard to pick one.

“It happens every so often, when I look back, and I’m like, ‘wow’,” he says. “When I first got my job, or my first job in America, or when I met the actor I looked up to when I was younger. Everything I’ve done feels like a win.”

“When you look at it retrospectively, it’s pretty mad,” Omari Douglas laughs, listing his last few years of projects and the high-drama intensity they share. He most recently appeared in Netflix’s blockbuster spy-thriller series Black Doves, alongside Ben Whishaw and Keira Knightley, which he plunged straight into shooting after the harrowing stage adaptation of A Little Life with James Norton. And before that, there were roles in drama It’s A Sin (which earned him a Bafta nomination), and the West End shows Cabaret and Constellations (gleaning another nomination, this time a Laurence Olivier Award).

“They are compelling stories,” he says of what draws him to at times agonising and thought-provoking projects. “I feel like every time that I have stepped into those worlds, [I am reflecting on] how I fit in and being in someone else’s shoes and looking at their perspective.”

Still, he must have a method for switching off after an intense day? “A snack and a cup of tea on the way home,” he grins. “And then you go again.”

Already a fan of Black Doves creator Joe Barton when the script came to him, he was instantly excited by the cat-and-mouse drama of underworld London, shoot outs and government secrets, but with a difference. “Joe has this ability to build amazing worlds. It’s definitely in the spy-thriller genre, but it’s witty and it’s got heart.”

Next up, amid plans to start creating his own projects, Douglas is heading back to the stage in the world-premiere production of Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew, a new play from Coral Wylie, described as “funny, affecting and beautifully queer”. “You’re constantly putting yourself on the line [in theatre],” Douglas says. “There’s always a risk in that, but I feel, at the minute, like I am going towards the fear. That really attracts me.”

From soap-opera star to superhero, in just a few short years, Ben Hardy has established himself as one of the most versatile actors in the industry. Following a two-year stint on British soap EastEnders, his first film gig was X-Men: Apocalypse – alongside James MacAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence, no less. The sheer scale of the opportunity was not lost on him.

“I was incredibly nervous,” Hardy says. “I was sat down at lunch with Jennifer [Lawrence] and I just froze. She was so lovely, but I struggled to even have a conversation.”

Hollywood, however, was smitten. Hardy went on to win the coveted role of the Queen drummer Roger Taylor in the Oscar-winning Freddie Mercury biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody. The role, for which he prepared with a drumming lesson from Taylor himself, earned Hardy a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination and paved the way for top billing in Michael Bay’s action thriller 6 Underground alongside Ryan Reynolds.

Yet, it is his part in Unicorns, from The Swimmers director Sally El Hosaini, that Hardy feels has been both his most challenging and proudest on-screen moment to date. He gives a beautifully nuanced performance as Luke, a mechanic and single father, who begins to grapple with his sexuality when he kisses a drag performer (Jason Patel) on a night out.

Like many of the best-created characters, so much lies in what is left unsaid. “I don’t know many people like Luke,” Hardy says. “He is so stoic... playing him was a balancing act of emoting without doing much. To have to express through your eyes.”

As Unicorns promo winds down (the film is up for a handful of awards and Netflix has snapped it up for streaming), Hardy is also wrapping filming on his first horror film, the next instalment of The Conjuring franchise.

Hardy earned his first production credit on Unicorns and getting behind the camera is one of his career goals. “I’ve always been a bit of a storyteller,” he says. “After years of working, you yearn for a bit more creative control.”

“Don’t watch this and do the washing up at the same time,” is Nikesh Patel’s advice for viewers of the mind-bending, Emmy-nominated The Devil’s Hour. “In the same way you wouldn’t multitask a good book.” He’s right: the multi-layered nuances of its compelling character arcs and time-defying action require your full attention.

Opposite Peter Capaldi’s sinister and mysterious character Gideon, Patel plays Ravi Dhillon and enjoyed discovering the more “thoughtful and apprehensive” sides of the TV detective role. “Existing in different timelines, you’re essentially playing different versions of the same guy, but subtly different.”

“The drama’s quite dark, but what Tom [Moran, the creator] does is punctuate that with moments of humour and levity.”

Shooting the first season (the third and final season is currently in the works) landed Patel in something of a dream scenario several years ago – working on two brilliant, but wildly different shows at the same time. The other was Starstruck, in which he costarred for three seasons with the show’s creator, Rose Matafeo, and found himself in equal measure in awe of the riffing comedians around him and relishing the more dramatic scenes.

Between The Devil’s Hour season three and Picture This, a romantic comedy in which he stars alongside Simone Ashley, he has excitingly varied releases on the horizon. But Patel has also started the year with a new perspective on his career. “Last year, becoming a dad, it’s reaffirmed that, yes, this profession can be up and down, but there’s a certain amount of clarity of now going, what do I want to do? Being a parent is about plate spinning and trying to figure out how to how to make it all work.”

This has given him a reinvigorated outlook on his future ambitions. “There’s something about realising that in this industry, when you’re in the driving seat on something, that’s really exciting,” he says. “But sometimes, if you want to tell a story that hasn’t been told before, you’ve got to wrestle it into shape yourself.”