10 Big British (or Irish) Actors You Forgot Were in 'Band of Brothers'

Twenty years ago, HBO released the first episode of what was, at the time, the most expensive miniseries ever made. Band of Brothers, which dramatised the lives (and deaths) of the men from the real-life “Easy” Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the United States Army, had been devised by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, three years after their Oscar-winning collaboration on Saving Private Ryan. Its 10 hour-long episodes ran for each of the next 10 weeks (delayed gratification: remember that?).

Band of Brothers was one of the first series to show just what clout big-budget TV could have – although by today’s standards, with Amazon Studio’s forthcoming Lord of the Rings reportedly costing $465m, its $125m budget seems not unreasonable – and quickly made its mark as must-see TV, back when there was a passing chance we might all watch the same thing at the same time. Its debut episode, which aired just two days before 9/11, after which the show’s marketing campaign was swiftly halted, was watched in the US by an audience of 10 million.

Although it was largely filmed here – at Hatfield Aerodrome in Hertfordshire – Band of Brothers’ British launch had a somewhat troubled start. Despite the BBC investing a reported £7-10m to air it in the UK, Controller of BBC One declared it “relatively niche” and bumped it to BBC Two. Its production location nevertheless meant it featured an astonishing number of young-buck British and Irish actors, ready to storm the battlements of Hollywood, a significant number of whom – from James McAvoy and Dominic Cooper to some guy called Tom Hardy – actually succeeded.

Cary Fukunaga, director of the imminent Bond film, No Time To Die, recently revealed on Instagram that a sequel to Band of Brothers, Masters of the Air (which, with Hanks and Spielberg’s 2010 miniseries The Pacific, makes up the last part of a trilogy) has now gone into production for Apple TV+, no doubt to the delight of its young cast, which includes Rafferty “son of Jude” Law (British!) and Dunkirk’s Barry Keoghan (Irish!). Masters of the Air is unlikely to land until at least next year, so in the meantime here at 10 familiar faces who burned brightly and, in some cases, very, very briefly, in the first iteration of Spielberg and Hanks’ landmark show two decades ago.