When the 2026 BAFTA Award for best actor in a leading role was announced in February, the split screen displayed a starry lineup of nominees — Timothée Chalamet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ethan Hawke, Michael B. Jordan, Jesse Plemons.
The winner, however, was not one of them but Robert Aramayo, a relatively unknown British actor in the upper-left corner. He’s Juilliard-trained, but his visible shock didn’t look like an act.
Aramayo won for his turn in the intimate, low-key biopic “I Swear,” in which he portrays John Davidson, a Scottish community activist with Tourette’s syndrome who has spent much of his adult life educating people about that neurodevelopmental disorder. Davidson was in the BAFTAs audience, and his uncontrollable Tourette’s outbursts were audible in the hall, including a racist slur he yelled when Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting an award.
The outbursts also went out on the BBC, and the fallout afterward — in which Black people, people with Tourette’s and others wrestled with Davidson’s words and how they were broadcast despite a two-hour delay — overshadowed the night’s results. At times, the ferocity of some reactions seemed to echo scenes in “I Swear,” where Davidson is chastised, and worse, for his verbal and physical tics.
The BBC recently acknowledged a breach of its editorial standards, and the dust is settling as “I Swear” prepares for a United States theatrical release on Friday. Now, we can focus on Aramayo’s surprise win — or wins, since he also picked up a BAFTA for rising star.
It all started with a gamble. The first time the film’s writer-director, Kirk Jones, saw Aramayo portray Davidson was when they began shooting “I Swear.”
Of course, the subject of a screen test had come up at the beginning of the casting process, but Aramayo had argued that, at that point, anything he did would be mere impersonation. “I was quite strong on not presenting something before it was the time to do it — because there was just so much I needed to learn,” he said in a recent interview at his apartment in Brooklyn. “John’s life is so complex — all of our lives are — so I wanted to take the time to just learn and gather information, and let that work on me.”
Jones wasn’t familiar with Aramayo’s two highest-profile roles — as Elrond on the series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” and the young Ned Stark in “Game of Thrones” — but he did like the actor’s turn as a mysterious addict in the Netflix thriller “Behind Her Eyes.” It might be hindsight speaking, but he seems remarkably relaxed about his unusual move now. “I could have thought, well, he’s just trying to get out of auditioning,” Jones said, laughing, in a video interview. “But I didn’t feel that was the case.”
What could look like a flex on Aramayo’s part actually feels like a quiet confidence and boldness. You can see a similar pattern in how he ended up at Juilliard.
After getting involved in children’s theater — “I was that kid,” he said, “mimicking people and creating characters” — he decided to apply to acting school. Searching online for the best in the world, he applied to one that popped up near the top of the results: the prestigious Upper West Side school, though it is an ocean away and a world apart from his hometown of Hull, a largely working-class city in the Yorkshire region of northern England.
“There is a big cultural difference, I think, between the Brits and the Americans, and it was a big shock for me coming here,” Aramayo, now 33, said. “But it’s also a big difference between being from Yorkshire and coming to America. When I got here, a lot of people were like, ‘God, that’s such an interesting accent.’” He laughed. “They had no idea what Hull and Yorkshire are — and there is a joy in that.”
Aramayo flourished at Juilliard. “He was super-talented, but he was a real hard worker,” said one of his teachers there, Richard Feldman. “He worked on himself and on his instrument and being able to be flexible with his dialect, with his body, with his voice, with his imagination. There isn’t anywhere he wasn’t willing to go.”
In practical terms, this meant Canada, where Aramayo headed to work on the mini-series “Lewis and Clark” before he had even graduated. HBO ended up pulling the plug before completion, but the exotic, faraway lands of “Game of Thrones” and “The Rings of Power” beckoned.
Still, Aramayo appears grounded in practical and artistic ways. He still lives in New York, in a small five-story walk-up perched above a busy thoroughfare, and remains committed to getting to know the people he plays — in Davidson’s case, literally.
After persuading Jones to cast him in “I Swear” and before presenting his characterization to the cameras, Aramayo spent time with Davidson and in his town of Galashiels, Scotland. He met other people with Tourette’s, as well as their families. “The smallest thing could open the biggest door in terms of understanding a character,” Aramayo said. “Sometimes it can be accent or language, or whatever, anything with your body, with your medium.”
He so immersed himself in Davidson’s life and psyche that he could improvise his tics — which felt more honest than scripting them, since they are beyond Davidson’s control. (Through a spokeswoman, Davidson declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Jones singled out a moment when Aramayo came up with a particularly colorful verbal outburst that took his co-star Peter Mullan by surprise. “The next day we’re shooting another scene, and I told Rob, ‘I can guarantee you that that line from yesterday will be in the film,’” the director said. “And Rob could not remember saying it.”
Aramayo didn’t make a big deal of his technique, preferring to praise Jones’s flexibility and openness. “Kirk is a very collaborative director,” he said. “When it came to improvisation and stuff like that, we’d have the structure of the scene and Kirk would allow us to sort of dance around it.”
Aramayo appears very aware of his responsibilities: He wanted to do right by Davidson, by other people with Tourette’s, by Galashiels and, of course, by Jones, who trusted him.
“I really care about doing a good job and playing the character to the best of my ability,” Aramayo said. “That’s what I try and do with every character I play. I try my best, that’s what I do.”
The post To Play a Man With Tourette’s, He Swapped the Script for Real Life appeared first on New York Times.
