James Nesbitt

James Nesbitt was born on January 15, 1965 in the difficult Northern Ireland, in the town of Ballymena. He was the youngest of the pious Presbyterian household, also made up of three sisters. Although he lived in a rural area, the Irish conflict would not stop affecting him, and on one occasion a car bomb exploded near where he was with his family. From Ballymena he moved to Broughshane and then to Coleraine. He studied at the Coleraine Academic Institution, and had no special interest in acting at all. Instead, he would give all his attention to learning French at Ulster University, thinking that his vocation was to be a teacher, like his father, who had taught him. He also thought about dedicating himself to football, a sport that he liked, as well as being a follower of Manchester United. However one of his teachers, Robert Simpson encouraged him to learn acting at the Riverside Theatre, which would eventually lead him to a drama school in London. After graduating in 1987, he dedicated himself to doing plays for seven years. But he would not be disgusted by the cinema, and in 1991 he would play his first role of interest for the big screen, quite secondary, under the orders ofPeter Chelson ; It was in the comedy Someday I’ll Find You , and it got attention. Minor presences would follow in television series such as The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones . Certainly not a big deal. In 1994 he married the actress Sonia Forbes-Adam, whom he had met five years earlier in the theater, and with whom he would have two daughters. Perhaps the first filmmaker who noticed that Nesbitt had the stuff of a good actor was Michael Winterbottom , as he will feature him in three titles, Go Now! (1995), Jude (1996) and Welcome to Sarajevo (1997).

But not everything had to be drama, so after the success of the television sitcom Cold Feet (1996), he signed up for an Irish costumbrista comedy, Waking Ned (1998), where the starting point –a lottery ticket awarded with the one that buries a dead person–, had its grace. Not surprisingly, three years later, Full Monty director Petter Cattaneo cast him in a prison comedy, Lucky Break (2001). In the same line of comedy, Danny Boyle would choose him for Millions (2004), a magical story starring children.

Maybe it’s the fate of a Northern Irish actor, but it’s no wonder Nesbitt ended up starring in a film about the IRA. The actor was lucky that it was Bloody Sunday (2002), to which Paul Greengrass gave an almost documentary aspect, when describing the sad outcome of a march in Londonderry for civil rights; such treatment fit with that aspect of a person of flesh and blood that Nesbitt presents, and the actor thoroughly prepared for his role as Catholic Ivan Cooper, speaking with protagonists of the events, and relatives of the victims; He also showed open-mindedness, since he is a Protestant. The actor would be present again in a film about IRA terrorism inFive minutes of glory (2009), where he makes a superb composition of a traumatized victim with a desire for revenge.

Nesbitt is a lucky man, as he has worked with Woody Allen in one of the best films of the New Yorker’s new millennium, Match Point (2005) . He has also landed roles of some interest in television series, especially the protagonists of Murphy’s Law –detective stories broadcast for five seasons between 2003 and 2007–, and Jekyll (2007), an updated revision of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic , which earned him a Golden Globe nomination; and he was Pontius Pilate in the miniseries about the Passion of the Christ The Passion (2008).

Among his new projects, his intervention in The Way stands out , a film produced in Spain directed by Emilio Estevez and starring Martin Sheen , set on the Camino de Santiago. We will also have to pay attention to Corolianus , an adaptation of Shakespeare’s work by Ralph Fiennes .