Learn more about Toby Jones's career ahead of 'Othello'

The BAFTA-winning Detectorists and Mr Bates vs the Post Office actor stars as Iago opposite David Harewood in a new West End production.

A character actor par excellence, Toby Jones has been a regular face on film and television since the early 1990s. He is known for both quirky, sympathetic roles and chilling villains, and it isn’t unusual for him to steal every scene he’s in. This autumn, Jones returns to the stage to play Iago in Tom Morris’s production of Othello at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, starring David Harewood in the title role.

Jones was born in London in 1955 to actors Jennifer Heslewood and Freddie Jones (best known for originating the role of Sir in Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser) and studied drama at the University of Manchester and at L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq.

At the beginning of his career, Jones appeared in bit parts and small supporting roles in films such as Orlando (directed by Sally Potter), Naked (directed by Mike Leigh), and Ever After (in the small but significant role of the Royal Page).

He continued with supporting parts at the turn of the millennium and into the 2000s, mostly in costume dramas, including Ladies in Lavender (alongside his father Freddie Jones), Finding Neverland, and Mrs Henderson Presents (starring Judi Dench), and on television in Aristocrats, Victoria & Albert, and Elizabeth I (starring Helen Mirren). He progressed to larger roles as artist William Hogarth in the TV movie The Harlot’s Progress and the villainous Daniel Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop.

In 2006, Jones played the writer Truman Capote in the biopic Infamous, which also featured Sandra Bullock and Daniel Craig. The film came out a year after Capote, for which Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar. Jones, however, received the London Film Critics’ Circle Award for his interpretation.

The phenomenon of a playing a real-life figure shortly after the release of a more high-profile film on the same subject was repeated with the 2012 television film That Girl, in which he played Alfred Hitchcock just after Anthony Hopkins had played the famous director in the Hollywood film Hitchcock. Nevertheless, Jones was nominated for a Golden Globe, an Emmy, and a BAFTA for his performance.

Jones has appeared in several major franchises. He provided the voice of house elf Dobby in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 as well as commentator Claudius Templeman in the first two instalments of The Hunger Games, and he played Arnim Winter in Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Basil Shaw in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

One of Jones’s best roles has to be that of Lance in the beautifully filmed and written comedy-drama Detectorists, opposite the show’s writer and director Mackenzie Crook as Andy, playing a pair of eccentric Suffolk-based metal detecting enthusiasts. He won a BAFTA for Best Male Comedy Performance in 2018 for the role.

Last year, Jones starred as campaigner Alan Bates in Mr Bates vs the Post Office, a dramatisation of the Post Office Scandal, in which many sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted due to faulty IT systems. The show made a remarkable impact.

Other recent work includes solicitor John Bickford in A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, which starred Lucy Boynton, as well as the title role in Mr Burton, the teacher and mentor of a young Richard Burton. Coming up, he plays Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in the series The Hack, exploring the News International phone hacking scandal.

Jones is constantly in demand on screen, so it’s amazing that he has the time to appear on stage! Read on to find out more about his theatre work.

Book Othello tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

The Play What I Wrote (2001-2003)

Written by Hamish McColl, Sean Foley, and Eddie Braben, The Play What I Wrote is named after a Morecambe and Wise catchphrase and involves a head-spinningly meta play-within-a-play. The show was first performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and then transferred to the West End.

Jones was originally asked to play multiple supporting roles, which were then merged into one character, Arthur (named after harmonica player Arthur Tolcher, who made multiple appearances in Morecambe and Wise sketches). He won the Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role and also appeared in the show on Broadway.

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (2009)

Tom Stoppard’s 1979 play with music by Andre Previn set in a Soviet psychiatric hospital is hardly ever staged because it requires a full orchestra. In this rare revival directed by Tom Morris, Jones played political prisoner Alexander Ivanov alongside Joseph Millson and Dan Stevens.

Parlour Song (2009)

In Jez Butterworth’s (Jerusalem) suburban nightmare at the Almeida Theatre, Jones played Ned, friend and neighbour of Andrew Lincoln’s demolition expert Dale. The role was originally taken on Broadway by Chris Bauer.

The Painter (2011)

Three years before Mike Leigh told the story of J.M.W. Turner in the film Mr Turner, starring Timothy Spall, Jones played the groundbreaking artist in Rebecca Lenkiewicz play The Painter at east London’s Arcola Theatre, shortly after it reopened in new premises in a converted paint factory (very apt!). Focusing on Turner’s relationships with the women in his life, it saw Denise Gough play his model Jenny Cole and Niamh Cusack his housekeeper and mistress Sarah Danby.

Circle Mirror Transformation (2013)

The Rose Lipman Centre in De Beauvoir Town, Hackney, played host to the European debut of Annie Baker’s play, produced by the Royal Court. Set in a Vermont community centre, Imelda Staunton played drama therapy leader Marty and Jones was divorced carpenter Schultz. The production was directed by James Macdonald.

The Birthday Party (2018)

The 60th-anniversary production of Harold Pinter’s first full-length play, a “comedy of menace” set in a seedy seaside boarding house, featured a superb cast: Jones, Stephen Mangan, Zoe Wanamaker, Pearl Mackie. LondonTheatre.co.uk’s reviewer observed that “Stanley is brought to a strange, disturbing sense of life - or it is a living death? - by the crumpled, dishevelled Toby Jones”.

Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp (2019)

In these four short plays by Caryl Churchill at the Royal Court, Jones played Bluebeard’s friend in Bluebeard and Jimmy in Imp. According to LondonTheatre.co.uk’s reviewer, the latter piece saw a “satisfying domestic drama unfold, as two late-middle-aged cousins who live together – played by Churchill veteran Deborah Findlay and Toby Jones respectively – bring to heartbreaking life their devastating loneliness and depression.”

Uncle Vanya (2020)

Director Ian Rickson and writer Conor McPherson joined forces with their production of the Chekhov classic. LondonTheatre.co.uk’s reviewer commented that “Toby Jones's unrequited passion for Rosalind Eleazar's beautiful Yelena, who is in turn desperately in love with Richard Armitage's Astrov, provides the painful anchors to the drama”. Jones was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performance in the title role.

Othello (2025)

There could be no more perfect role for Jones’s Shakespeare debut: the wickedly scheming Iago in Othello. David Harewood (Homeland) reprises the title role almost 30 years after he became the first Black actor to play the “Moor of Venice” at the National Theatre 1997. Caitlin FitzGerald (Masters of Sex) co-stars as Desdemona and production is directed by Tom Morris (War Horse), who previously directed Jones in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. It’s the most anticipated Shakespeare production of the autumn.

Says Jones: “I am eagerly anticipating rehearsals for Othello with David Harewood, Caitlin FitzGerald and Tom Morris, preparing as best I can to immerse myself in this dark, sad, funny, mysterious world.”

Book Othello tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Main photo credit: Toby Jones in Uncle Vanya (Photo by Johan Persson)