Henry Ashton (actor)

Ashton grew up in Buckinghamshire.^[1] He attended Millfield School from 2004 to 2009. He was interested in acting in his youth, but would bounce around in different jobs for a decade, including retail, hospitality, fashion, and music before deciding to pursue acting professionally. He initially applied to drama school at 18 but did not get into program he wanted, he was working at Harrods at the time, selling keychains and teddy bears at the gift shop. Years later he was motivated to pursue his acting dreams once more after a conversation with his friend. He had just finished a shift at his hotel job, where he worked as a manager, and during that meeting he expressed distress about his future career prospects. Soon after he applied to twelve different acting schools.^[2] He trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, graduating in 2022.^[3]

Prior to completing drama school, Ashton made his feature film debut portraying Kevin Shields in the 2021 Alan McGee biopic Creation Stories.^[4] After graduating, he made his television debut in the seventh season of the Starz fantasy series Outlander as Sandy Hammond, which aired in 2023.^[5][6]

In 2024, Ashton gained prominence through his roles as Stan Dudley in the Amazon Prime alternate history fantasy series My Lady Jane^[7] and Max Hastings in the BBC Three teen crime drama A Good Girl's Guide to Murder,^[8] both adaptations of novels.^[9][10] He had been cast in the former in 2022,^[11] landing the job on the day he graduated from drama school,^[12] while the latter also had an international release on Netflix.

Ashton played Daeron "the Drunken" Targaryen in the HBO fantasy series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a Game of Thrones prequel and adaptation of George R R Martin's Dunk and Egg series.^[13][14] The series premiered in 2026.