British Actors You Should Know: Jared Harris

If British actor Jared Harris seems omnipresent these days, it's because he generally is. He seems to pop up on virtually every sort of award-winning prestige drama, playing every sort of character, from heroes to villains to something in between. If you're only familiar with his work from one of them - the award-winning disaster drama Chernobyl or the dramatic mystery The Beast Must Die or even everyone's favorite 1950s period drama Mad Men - you're missing out on a wide array of fabulous performances.

The son of the late, beloved Richard Harris (most recently seen as the original Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films), he's been working regularly since the mid-1990s in the sort of smaller character parts we generally expect from British actors. While Mad Men is likely remembered as the role that served as Harris' big break in the minds of American audiences, he'd also appeared in everything from Fringe to a Sherlock Holmes film by that point.

Here’s a look at several of Harris' most notable roles, in roughly chronological order, if only because I don't want to play favorites between them all.