Matthew Tennyson

Matthew Tennyson is an English actor of stage and screen. He won the Evening Standard Award for Outstanding Newcomer in 2012.

Early life Tennyson was born in Stoke Newington, London, and is from a Jewish background. He is the son of Jonathan Tennyson, a physics professor, and a nurse. He is a great-great-great-grandson of poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Education Tennyson was educated at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), from which he graduated in 2011.

Career Tennyson made his professional stage debut in 2011 under the direction of Trevor Nunn in the role of Percy in Flare Path at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, followed by Jamie in Beautiful Thing at The Royal Exchange for which he received the Best Newcomer award at the 2011 Manchester Theatre Awards. The following year he was the recipient of the 2012 Milton Shulman Award for Outstanding Newcomer at the Evening Standard Awards for his performance as Eric in Making Noise Quietly at the Donmar Warehouse. In 2013 he played Puck in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, at Shakespeare's Globe.

His television roles include Clarence in The Hollow Crown (Henry IV Parts I and II), Ottaviano Riario in Borgia. Lysander in the Russell T Davies television adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. He has also appeared in the ITV detective dramas Midsomer Murders and Grantchester, and the BBC period drama Father Brown.

On radio, Tennyson played "Jonesy" in Radio 4 play "Jonesy" by Tom Wells broadcast in February 2014. He featured in the film Pride, directed by Matthew Warchus.

In 2017 Tennyson played the title role in the Royal Shakespeare Company's gender-fluid 2017 production of Oscar Wilde's Salomé.

He is a frequent collaborator with the playwright Robert Holman since appearing in the Donmar Warehouse production of his play Making Noise Quietly. Holman went on to write A Breakfast of Eels and The Lodger with parts written specifically for Tennyson.

He was the lead in the Olivier Award winning A Monster Calls at The Old Vic, for which he received critical acclaim.

Tennyson played the war poet Wilfred Owen in Terence Davies film biopic of Siegfried Sassoon, Benediction.

In 2023, Tennyson joined the cast of The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh at The Duke of York's Theatre alongside Steve Pemberton, Lily Allen and Paul Kaye.

In 2024 Tennyson played Edgar in King Lear at the Almeida Theatre directed by Yaël Farber. At the end of that year and into 2025 he starred alongside Simon Russell Beale as the younger A. E. Housman "played both gently and intensely" in the Hampstead Theatre's revival of Stoppard's The Invention of Love.