Rory Kinnear (born 17 February 1978) is an award-winning English actor who has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre.

The son of actor Roy Kinnear and actress Carmel Cryan, he has two sisters, Kirsty and Karina. Through his father he is the grandson of the Scottish rugby player Roy Muir Kinnear, and he is the godson of Michael Williams. Educated at Tower House School and St Paul's School (London), he read English at Balliol College, Oxford and then studied acting at LAMDA.

Kinnear's performances in Phyllida Lloyd's production of Mary Stuart and Trevor Nunn's Hamlet, in which he played Laertes, met with acclaim. He also achieved recognition as the outrageous Sir Fopling Flutter in The Man of Mode at the National Theatre, winning a Laurence Olivier Award and Ian Charleson Award. Other notable theatre work includes the lead in Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, the role of Pyotr in Gorky's Philistines and the role of Mitia in a stage adaptation of the Nikita Mikhalkov film Burnt by the Sun, all for the National Theatre.

Lyndsey Marshal (born 16 June 1978) is an English actress best known for her performance in The Hours, as the recurring character Cleopatra on HBO's Rome, and as Lady Sarah Hill in BBC period drama Garrow's Law.

Marshal was born in Manchester, England. After studying the classics at college for a career in archeology, she applied to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.

Her first major part was in the play Fireface at the Royal Court Theatre, which she took just before graduation. In 2001 she won the Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Best Newcomer in 2001 for her performances in Redundant at the Royal Court Theatre and Boston Marriage at the Donmar Warehouse. In 2003, she won the TMA Theatre Award for Best Supporting Actress in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Since then she has performed leading roles in fourteen theatre productions, most recently alongside James McAvoy in the 2009 West End production Three Days of Rain. In 2011 she appeared in Greenland at the National Theatre.

Marshal has appeared in the films The Hours alongside Nicole Kidman, and Hereafter, directed by Clint Eastwood.

Rufus Norris is an award-winning British theatre director who trained as an actor at RADA before turning to directing.

In 2001 he won the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer for his production of Afore Night Came at the Young Vic.

In 2004, Norris won another Evening Standard Award, a Critic's Circle Award and an Olivier Award nomination for Best Director, for his production of Festen.

In 2009, Norris' first film King Bastard, written by his wife Tanya Ronder, was produced by BBC Films. In the same year, he directed the Royal National Theatre's production of Death and the King's Horseman which played in the Olivier Theatre.

He created the 2011 production Doctor Dee for the Manchester International Festival, in collaboration with musician Damon Albarn.

Cillian Murphy  /ˈkɪliən/ (born 25 May 1976) is an Irish film and theatre actor. He is often noted by critics for his chameleonic performances in diverse roles and his distinctive blue eyes.

A native of Cork, Murphy began his performing career as a rock musician. After turning down a record deal, he made his professional acting debut in the play Disco Pigs in 1996. He went on to star in Irish and British film and stage productions throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, first coming to international attention in 2003 as the hero in the post-apocalyptic film 28 Days Later. Murphy's best-known roles are as villains in two 2005 blockbusters: Scarecrow in the superhero film Batman Begins (a role later reprised as a cameo in The Dark Knight), and Jackson Rippner in the thriller Red Eye. Next came two contrasting and acclaimed starring roles: his Golden Globe Award-nominated performance as a glam transgender orphan teen in 2005's Breakfast on Pluto and a turn as a 1920s Irish revolutionary in the 2006 Palme d'Or winner, The Wind That Shakes the Barley. In 2010, Murphy played the target of Leonardo DiCaprio's dreamscape heist in the acclaimed blockbuster Inception.

Simon Timothy "Tim" Roth (born 14 May 1961) is an English film actor and director. He is best known for his roles in the films Made in Britain, Legend of 1900, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, Skellig, Planet of the Apes, The Incredible Hulk and Rob Roy, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the latter. He most recently starred as Cal Lightman in the TV series Lie to Me.

Roth was born in London, England, the son of Ann, a painter and teacher, and Ernie, a Fleet Street journalist, painter and, until the 1970s, a member of the British Communist Party. Roth's father was born under the surname "Smith" in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York, to a British immigrant family of Irish descent; he changed his surname to "Roth" in the 1940s, "partly through solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust, partly because the British were far from welcome in some of the countries to which his job took him".

Roth attended the Strand School in Tulse Hill. As a young man, he wanted to be a sculptor and studied at London's Camberwell College of Art.