Ari Millen is at his best when he is doing almost nothing: a held grin, a voice that never rises, a man waiting at a kerb. Television found a use for that on Orphan Black; the film that finally made him a lead did not.
Fi1m perspective
There is a scene early in Ice Cream Man (2026), before anyone has died, in which Ari Millen sits in his van at the kerb with the engine running and does nothing at all. He is in the white uniform and cap, grinning, and the grin does not move. We were unnerved, more than by any of the gore that follows, because he is the only person in the film who is not shouting, and stillness in a horror film reads as knowledge. It is the best thing in an 86-minute film we scored poorly, and the script then gives him almost nothing else to do.
He arrived on Orphan Black in its second season in 2014, having failed to get a part in the first, as Mark, a single role that did not stay single for long. The show did to him what it had already done to Tatiana Maslany: he became several men. Rudy, Miller and Ira among them were his set of clones, told apart by posture, voice and how they held their faces, and he stayed in the main cast until the series ended in 2017. It remains the only sustained test of what he can do, and he passed it. The trouble was the show around him. We said at the time that it was less sure what to do with his set than with hers, and that is fair: his clones arrived with the conspiracy, and the conspiracy was the part of the programme we had stopped following.
What he does well is hold something back. The decent clones and the dangerous ones came from the same face, and the difference was mostly in what he let out of it, which is harder than the loud kind of acting and easier to overlook. Jenifur Jarvis's white uniform in Ice Cream Man works for the same reason: it is a costume for someone who is supposed to be harmless, and the more blood lands on it the more wrong he looks. Eli Roth understood that much about him, then built a film with one idea and no second act for its villain. Since Orphan Black the work has mostly been recurring television, The Expanse (2018) among it, and Canadian genre films such as The Oak Room (2020) and Vicious Fun (2020), which we have not reviewed.
"It's been the most exhilarating and exciting acting experience I've ever had," he said of the clones in 2015, and on the evidence nothing since has asked as much of him. The pattern is a still, unsettling actor who keeps being handed unsettling parts and then left standing in them. Somebody should give him a room, another actor, and a scene that lasts longer than a grin.
Biography
Ari Millen is a Canadian actor. He was born on 19 January 1982 in Kingston, Ontario, and trained at Ryerson University’s Theatre School, graduating in 2007 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
He is best known for playing multiple Castor clones, including Mark, Rudy, Miller and Ira, in the science-fiction series Orphan Black (2013–2017). For this work he received the Canadian Screen Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Continuing Leading Dramatic Role in 2016. His other television credits include roles in The Expanse (2018), 12 Monkeys (2015) and Reign (2013).
Millen has appeared in films such as The Oak Room (2020) and Vicious Fun (2020), and played the title role in the 2026 horror film Ice Cream Man.
