The shock was genuine. When Robert Aramayo was announced as the Bafta best actor winner on Sunday night at the Royal Festival Hall in London, the 33-year-old actor from Hull seemed — mouth open, eyes wide — positively aghast. He wasn’t the only one. In a room that clearly expected the awards season frontrunner and Hollywood golden boy Timothée Chalamet to win, yet again, for his flashy turn as a ping-pong champ in Marty Supreme, there were excitable howls of disbelief. Aramayo, a relative unknown who once played a young Ned Stark in Games of Thrones, had delivered the upset of the evening, beating not only Chalamet but Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael B Jordan, Ethan Hawke and Jesse Plemons.
Yet for those of us who have seen Aramayo’s performance as a Tourette syndrome campaigner from Galashiels in Scotland called John Davidson in the warm-hearted British indie I Swear, and marvelled at the technical virtuosity of the turn combined with its deep sadness, the win made total sense. From the moment last month that Aramayo was nominated, a win on the night seemed both unlikely and also the only rightful outcome.
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The film is a biopic of Davidson that begins with a brash and darkly funny set piece featuring Aramayo’s central protagonist receiving his MBE in 2019 from Queen Elizabeth for his efforts in promoting a greater understanding of Tourette’s in the UK. The setting is opulent, the room is hushed and respectful, and while the awards are being doled out, Davidson suddenly shouts, releasing a vocal tic, “F*** the Queen!” (A note to Bafta organisers dealing with the blowback from Davidson’s Tourette’s-related swearing during the ceremony — did you even watch the film?)
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I Swear is more than just the comedy of red faces and inappropriate imprecations. It tells the story of Davidson’s hard-knock life in rich and difficult detail. It flashes back through his childhood and describes the nightmarish reality of living in a world that sees your uncontrollable neurological disorder as deliberate rudeness and aggression. Aramayo’s Davidson is frequently ostracised, badly beaten and even arrested (he blurts “pigs, pigs, pigs!” when walking near police officers). Yet the genius of the performance, and the reason why Aramayo simply had to win the Bafta, is that Davidson remains resilient, sensitive and, even through streaming tears while lying bloodied in a hospital bed, hopeful of a redemptive human connection.
As Elrond in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
ALAMY
The film’s writer and director, Kirk Jones (Waking Ned), had originally discussed casting someone with Tourette syndrome in the central role. He even screen-tested the 54-year-old Davidson for the film’s later-life scenes. But Jones has said that it was “uncomfortable” and “nothing short of a disaster”, and essentially required Davidson to suppress his tics and then to fake them on cue. Once Aramayo had been cast, in August 2024, the actor moved to Galashiels and spent a month living near Davidson, accompanying him to work in the local community centre. “I didn’t want to impersonate him,” Aramayo has said, “but I wanted to find his energy.”
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Nothing in Aramayo’s back catalogue had suggested a performance of this magnitude. Fantasy fans might recognise him from Game of Thrones or, more recently, from the Lord of the Rings prequel The Rings of Power, in which he plays the Elf Lord leader Elrond. Other eye-catching roles include playing a hillbilly rapist and murderer for Tom Ford in Nocturnal Animals and a deranged serial killer in the hit crime series Mindhunter. He certainly has that look. The sharp cheekbones, hard jaw and nervy gimlet-eyed stare can go either way: psycho killer or lost and lonely soul. It’s another reason why he’s impossibly perfect for Davidson. He makes the character’s sense of threat to those around him seem real, even when he’s at his most vulnerable.
As a young Eddard Stark in Game of Thrones
HBO
Aramayo grew up in Hull in the 1990s and began acting for Hull Truck Theatre’s youth programme aged ten. “That’s when it started to get serious,” he has said. His father is an upholsterer and his mother a foster care worker. When Aramayo announced, aged 16, that he wanted to study acting at the Juilliard School in New York (after googling “best drama school in the world”), his parents had to “gather” the money from family and friends. Aramayo auditioned for Juilliard in 2011 and won a place, the only British student to be accepted that year. At 18 he moved to New York to study and has lived there ever since.
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Early dividends from the Juilliard investment looked slim, especially when Aramayo was cast, straight after graduation, in a six-part HBO series starring Casey Affleck about the Corps of Discovery expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Following three months of preparation on location in Canada and a month of shooting, the series was abandoned. Game of Thrones followed, however, as did a supporting role in the Netflix thriller Behind Her Eyes, which is where Jones spotted his leading man. Jones has since revealed that he cast Aramayo as Davidson without even asking him to read for the part, which he now says was “insane”. Yes, and also inspired. Lauren Evans won the film’s third Bafta on Sunday night for best casting.
Aramayo has just finished a run on stage in Guess How Much I Love You? at the Royal Court in London for which he won rave reviews. His first post-I Swear film role has yet to be finalised but he has said of the media attention surrounding him now, and the awards season hype, that he’s just hoping for a break and to enjoy some well-earned “radio silence”. Good luck with that.
I Swear is available to buy/rent and will stream on Netflix from March 10