Tuppence Middleton

Biography

Tuppence Middleton is an English actress. She has appeared in feature films such as Tormented (2009), Chatroom (2010), Cleanskin (2012), Trance (2013), The Lady Vanishes (2013), The Imitation Game (2014), and Jupiter Ascending (2015), as well as in television series such as Bones (2008), New Tricks (2010), Friday Night Dinner (2011), Sinbad (2012), Spies of Warsaw (2013), Black Mirror (2013) and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams (2017). From 2015 to 2018, she portrayed Riley Blue in the Netflix original series Sense8.

She starred in two British period dramas screened around the same time: Dickensian (2015–16), playing Miss Havisham, and War & Peace (2016), playing Russian princess and villain Hélène Kuragina. She was most recently cast as Lucy Smith, a new and leading character in the 2019 film adaptation Downton Abbey. In 2010, she was nominated for the London Evening Standard Film Awards for Most Promising Newcomer.

In interviews, she has described her younger self as shy, reclusive, and “geeky” at school but “quite loud and brash” at home. She found youth theatre an “outlet” in which she could be confident.