Stuart Townsend

Biography:

Stuart Townsend (born December 15, 1972) is an Irish actor best known for playing Lestat de Lioncourt in the 2002 film adaptation of Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned and Dorian Gray in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003). He made his directorial debut in 2007 with Battle in Seattle.

Born in Howth, County Dublin, he is the son of Irish model Lorna Hogan and English professional golfer Peter Townsend. His younger brother, Dylan, is also an actor.

Townsend studied at Dublin’s Gaiety School of Acting and first appeared on stage in 1993 in Colin Teevan’s Tear Up The Black Sail. He made his professional stage debut the next year in True Lines, which went from Kilkenny to the Dublin Theatre Festival and then the Bush Theatre in London. Early in his film career, he appeared in shorts such as Godsuit and Summertime before moving on to features like Trojan Eddie (1996) and Shooting Fish (1997). His role in About Adam brought him attention in the U.S. He later returned briefly to the London stage in Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending (2000), opposite Helen Mirren, before securing larger film roles. Townsend played the vampire Lestat in Queen of the Damned and Dorian Gray in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Originally cast as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, he was replaced by Viggo Mortensen just before filming began.

In 2005, Townsend starred in the short-lived ABC series Night Stalker, portraying reporter Carl Kolchak. He also guest-starred on Will & Grace and appeared uncredited in Æon Flux. He co-starred with Ryan Reynolds in Chaos Theory (2007) and directed Battle in Seattle the same year, a dramatization of the 1999 WTO protests, featuring Charlize Theron, Ray Liotta, and Woody Harrelson. The film, however, had limited distribution. Townsend was initially cast as Fandral in Kenneth Branagh’s Thor, but left the project in 2010 over creative differences. He later appeared in Betrayal, Salem, and a 2017 episode of Law & Order: SVU. In 2021, he acted in The Martini Shot and Grace and Grit.

His father, Peter Townsend, competed in the Ryder Cup in 1969 and 1971. Stuart has siblings from both of his father’s marriages: Dylan and Chloe from Peter’s first marriage to Lorna (who died in 1994), and Hugo and Ella from his second marriage to Sofia, a Swedish woman.

Townsend was in a long-term relationship with actress Charlize Theron, whom he met while filming Trapped in 2002. Though never legally married, the couple referred to themselves as husband and wife. They separated in early 2010 during a vacation in Mexico.

By 2015, his brother reported that Townsend had moved to Costa Rica, where he lived with a local partner and was expecting a second child. By 2019, Townsend was living in Santa Monica with his wife and two children. That year, he was briefly arrested after a domestic dispute, though no charges were brought against him.