A tall, dependable ensemble player who has spent fifteen years being cast for his shoulders, as knights, pirates and superheroes. He does the job without fuss; the one film of his we have reviewed gave him a squad car and little else to do.
Fi1m perspective
Tom Hopper is six foot five, and nearly everything he has been asked to do on screen begins with that. Producers have looked at him and seen a knight, a pirate, a soldier, a superhero, and he has obliged each time, with the good grace of a man who knows why he was hired. He has said himself that there was a question mark early on over whether he would work at all, because so few parts were written for someone his height. Enough of them were.
The career is a television career in the main. Sir Percival in Merlin (2010–2012) was the first part that stuck, and it set the pattern: the loyal big man towards the back of the ensemble. Billy Bones in Black Sails (2014–2017) gave him four seasons and more to carry, and Dickon Tarly in Game of Thrones (2017) was a brief, well-placed appearance in a programme everyone was watching. Then came Luther Hargreeves in The Umbrella Academy (2019–2024), the longest job he has had, for which he trained in martial arts and wore a muscle suit, a fair measure of an actor being asked to be even larger than he already is. We have not reviewed any of these and will not judge them here, except to note that four seasons near the centre of an ensemble is not a thing you are handed by accident.
The films have been thinner. He turns up in support in Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), and in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) he is Albert Wesker, sharing a squad car with Hannah John-Kamen's Jill Valentine and bickering with her while Johannes Roberts tries to film two games in one wet night. We scored that film 47 and said the cast was better than the script gave them cause to be. Hopper was part of that cast, and the trouble is that he is given so little that we came out unable to say what he had done. That bothered us. An actor that size should not be able to disappear in a film that short, and that he did is the script's failing before it is his.
The criticism that follows him is the obvious one: that the parts are strongman parts and nobody has yet asked for much more. We do not know whether more is there, because the evidence has not been put in front of us. He is a reliable, unshowy presence, and there is a place for reliable and unshowy in the kind of series that runs for years. What we would like is for someone to cast him against the shoulders, in a part where being the biggest man in the room is the difficulty rather than the qualification. Until then, he is the man you are glad to see in the background, and slightly sorry to see stay there.
Biography
Tom Hopper is an English actor. Born Thomas Edward Hopper on 28 January 1985 in Coalville, Leicestershire, he studied acting at Rose Bruford College. He began his career with guest roles in British television series including Casualty (2007) and Doctor Who (2010), and appeared in the film Tormented (2009).
Hopper is known for his roles as Sir Percival in Merlin (2010–2012), William "Billy Bones" Manderly in Black Sails (2014–2017), Dickon Tarly in Game of Thrones (2017), and Luther Hargreeves in The Umbrella Academy (2019–2024). His film credits include I Feel Pretty (2018), Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) as William Hadrell, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) and Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard (2021). He is married to actress Laura Higgins.
