Jared Harris is unusually good at showing the effort of keeping fear out of a professional conversation. We trust his quiet, strained performances most when the writing gives him something difficult to explain.
Fi1m perspective
In A House of Dynamite (2025), Jared Harris listens to the odds of stopping a nuclear missile with a look of painful concentration. His Secretary of Defense Reid Baker seems to understand the figures and dread the answer. We felt sick when the interception odds were put at roughly a coin toss, because the machinery we had seen suddenly offered so little reassurance. Harris is the strongest performer in Kathryn Bigelow's film, even as its repeated eighteen-minute structure begins to weaken the tension.
He spent years in supporting film parts, including Andy Warhol in I Shot Andy Warhol (1996). Wider recognition came with Lane Pryce in Matthew Weiner's Mad Men (2007), a role he played from 2009 to 2012. Television then gave him Captain Francis Crozier in The Terror (2018) and the lead in Chernobyl (2019).
In Craig Mazin and Johan Renck's Chernobyl, the tiredness is there in Harris's careful delivery as Valery Legasov. The helicopter scene, with Legasov refusing a flight over the open reactor and Stellan Skarsgård's Boris Shcherbina threatening him, shows the value of that restraint. Harris makes the warning urgent without making Legasov seem suddenly fearless. The series explains too much towards the end, but his exchanges with Skarsgård keep its middle hours absorbing.
Kelly Reichardt uses him differently in Certain Women (2016). His Fuller talks over Laura's legal advice, then accepts the same opinion from a male lawyer, played by Guy Boyd. Harris makes the man's need to be heard plain without making his refusal to listen any less maddening, while Laura Dern lets the exhaustion register afterwards. We need patience with this section of the film, and the third story is stronger, but it is good to see Harris playing the man who will not listen.
Daniel Espinosa's Morbius (2022) is a reminder to check what surrounds him: its thin writing makes for a poor evening. We would not recommend it on his name alone. Start with Chernobyl, on an evening when something frightening is welcome.
Biography
Jared Harris is a British actor. He was born in London on 24 August 1961, the son of actors Richard Harris and Elizabeth Rees-Williams. He studied drama and literature at Duke University and trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
Harris made his film debut in The Rachel Papers (1989) and has since appeared in films including The Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). His television roles include Lane Pryce in Mad Men (2007–2012), for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award, and Valery Legasov in the miniseries Chernobyl (2019), for which he won a British Academy Television Award for Best Actor. He played Secretary of Defense Reid Baker in the 2025 film A House of Dynamite.
