Thomas Sidney Jerome Sturridge is an English actor. His early films include Being Julia (2004), Like Minds (2006), and The Boat That Rocked (2009). He was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performances in Orphans (2013) and Sea Wall/A Life (2020). He was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance in American Buffalo (2016). Since 2022, Sturridge has starred as Dream in the Netflix fantasy series The Sandman. Early life Sturridge was born in Lambeth, London, one of three children of director Charles Sturridge and actress Phoebe Nicholls. His sister, Matilda Sturridge, is also an actress. Sturridge was educated at The Harrodian School, an independent school in Barnes in South West London, whose pupils included future actors Robert Pattinson, Will Poulter and George MacKay. Between the years 1999 ('Short Half') and 2001, Sturridge attended Winchester College, an independent school for boys in Winchester, Hampshire. He boarded at the College's House E (Morshead's)"Freddie's". Career Sturridge began his career working as a child actor and he was in the 1996 television adaptation of Gulliver's Travels, directed by his father and co-starring his mother. He reemerged in 2004 with Vanity Fair and Being Julia. In 2005 he played William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke in BBC4's A Waste of Shame. In 2006, he played the role of Nigel in the psychological thriller Like Minds, also known by the title of Murderous Intent. It tells the story of two boys, Alex (played by Eddie Redmayne) and Nigel, placed together as room-mates, much to Alex's objections. Alex is horrified and yet fascinated with the ritual-influenced deaths that begin to occur around them, and when Nigel himself is murdered, Alex is blamed. He was originally cast as the lead in the sci-fi trilogy Jumper. However in 2006, two months into production, New Regency and 20th Century Fox, fearing the gamble of spending over $100 million on a film starring an unknown actor, replaced him with the "more prominent" Hayden Christensen. In 2009, he appeared as Carl, one of the lead roles in the Richard Curtis comedy The Boat That Rocked (known as Pirate Radio in the United States), alongside Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans and Philip Seymour Hoffman. In September, 2009, he made his stage debut in Punk Rock, a then newly dramatised play by Simon Stephens at the Lyric Hammersmith