Igby Rigney's trade is the watchful young man in someone else's story, first for Mike Flanagan and now, as a fictional Bret Easton Ellis in The Shards, at the centre of one. He holds attention. What else he can hold, we do not yet know.
Fi1m perspective
In The Shards (2026) Igby Rigney narrates as Bret Easton Ellis, and he does it in Ellis's own voice: the flat, careful cadence of the author's audiobook readings, borrowed and worn like a jacket. It is the most deliberate thing in the series and the thing we kept noticing. Sometimes it is exactly right, a teenager already talking about his life as if it were over. Sometimes it tips into imitation, and you can hear the homework.
Until then he had been a face in somebody else's crowd. A guest part on Blue Bloods in 2018, small film roles in Joe Bell (2020) and F9 (2021, as young Jesse), and then Mike Flanagan, who cast him as Warren Flynn in Midnight Mass (2021) and kept him on: Kevin in The Midnight Club (2022), Toby in The Fall of the House of Usher (2023). Flanagan's young men are there to be frightened on our behalf and to listen while older people make speeches, and Rigney did both without fuss. We liked Midnight Mass and did not single him out, which for a young actor in a Flanagan ensemble is close to the job description.
The Shards is the first time anyone has asked him to carry something, and he does more of the carrying than the series deserves. We found it a mixed affair, handsome about early-1980s Los Angeles and slack about its own mystery, and Rigney was the clearest reason to keep going. He makes adolescent uncertainty watchable across a long run without letting us read him, which is the hard part when the narrator is also the one we are meant to doubt. When the plotting went soft, and it often did, we were still watching his face for what he was not saying, and that is a skill, not a tic. He did not meet Ellis before shooting: "I didn’t have access to Bret and I don’t have access to whatever information I could have potentially learned from that, so I could just let that piece go and really focus on what Ryan was giving us on the day." You can hear that too. The voice is the author's; the boy is Ryan Murphy's.
What we do not know is whether he can play anything other than the insulated young man keeping a secret, because that is all he has been asked to play. Flanagan gave him fear and a community; Murphy gave him privilege and a mystery; nobody has yet given him a joke or a job. The next part matters more than the last one. If it is another rich boy narrating his own unease, we will worry. If it is something ordinary and in daylight, we would like to see it.
Biography
Igby Rigney is an American actor. He was born on 6 June 2003 in Ossining, New York, and attended Pace University, where he studied film and psychology. He began acting in 2018 with a guest role in an episode of the television series Blue Bloods.
Rigney is known for his collaborations with filmmaker Mike Flanagan. He portrayed Warren Flynn in the 2021 Netflix miniseries Midnight Mass, Kevin in the 2022 series The Midnight Club, and Toby in the 2023 miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher. Other credits include the films Joe Bell (2020) and F9 (2021), in which he played a young Jesse, as well as guest roles in The Sex Lives of College Girls (2022) and Grey's Anatomy (2025). In 2026 he starred as a fictionalised teenage Bret Easton Ellis in the FX series The Shards.
