Cary Elwes

Cary Elwes (birthname: Ivan Simon Cary Elwes) has built a long and respected career as a supporting actor since 1984 when he debuted in Julian Mitchell’s film version of his play, Another Country, which also featured Colin Firth in his feature debut opposite Rupert Everett. In his next major film credit, Elwes co-starred with Helena Bonham Carter in the Trevor Nunn-directed and David Edgar-written Lady Jane (1986). Elwes became associated with a perennial classic in 1987 as co-star of Rob Reiner’s cult movie, The Princess Bride, with Robin Wright, Mandy Patinkin, Chris Sarandon, Christopher Guest, Wallace Shawn, and Fred Savage.

Elwes was then cast in a co-starring role in Glory (1989), starring Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington (Oscar winner for best-supporting actor), and Morgan Freeman, and then opposite Tom Cruise in Tony Scott’s hit ($158 million) race car drama, Days of Thunder (1990), while being cast by director Mel Brooks as Robin Hood in Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), with Richard Lewis, Roger Rees, Dave Chappelle, and Tracey Ullman. After these starring roles, Cary Elwes shifted into mainly supporting roles in several major Hollywood movies, starting with Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), with Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, and Keanu Reeves, and grossing a strong $216 million.

This was followed for Elwes with a starring role in writer-director Alan Shapiro’s The Crush (1993), with Alicia Silverstone; a co-starring role for Elwes under co-writer/director Stephen Sommer in Disney’s The Jungle Book (1994), with Jason Scott Lee, Sam Neill, and John Cleese; Elwes’s supporting role in the Warner Bros. thriller (and first theatrical feature released in ancillary on the then-new DVD format), Twister (1996), with Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Todd Field, and earning a whopping $495.7 million.

Another supporting role for Elwes in another mega-hit ($302.7 million), the Jim Carrey-starring comedy, Liar Liar (1997); a major supporting role in the thriller, Kiss the Girls (1997), co-starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd; and a more distinguished role for Elwes as John Houseman (opposite many fine actors including Hank Azaria, Ruben Blades, John Cusack, Philip Baker Hall, Cherry Jones, Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, John Turturro, and Emily Watson) in a less commercially-successful drama, writer-director Tim Robbins’ lovingly made version of Marc Blitzstein’s play, Cradle Will Rock (1999), which is not based on the Orson Welles’ still-unproduced screenplay.

Cary Elwes played in his second Dracula-themed drama, the remarkable film directed by E. Elias Merhige, Shadow of the Vampire (2000), with Willem Dafoe, John Malkovich, Eddie Izzard, and Udo Kier. Another historical character for Elwes was movie mogul Thomas Ince in Peter Bogdanovich’s murder mystery, The Cat’s Meow (2001), with Kirsten Dunst and Izzard. One of the biggest hits in Elwes’s long filmography is his first exploitation horror movie, the original movie in the Saw (2004) franchise, earning 100 times its $1 million budget, and reuniting with the franchise team in Saw 3D (2010), the seventh entry in the series.

Elwes played opposite Anne Hathaway, Hugh Dancy, and Vivica A. Fox in the failed U.S./U.K./Irish jukebox musical, Ella Enchanted (2004), and then appeared in Ivan Reitman’s successful rom-com, No Strings Attached (2011), with Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher. Elwes was a favorite during this period with comedy director Garry Marshall, who cast him in both Georgia Rule (2007) and New Year’s Eve (2011), opposite Robert De Niro and Halle Berry.

Cary Elwes gained his first role—a small one since it was the last role cast– under Steven Spielberg’s direction in the animated version of Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin (2011). Elwes either starred or was supported in several minor movies following this, including The Citizen (2012), Behaving Badly (2013), with Selena Gomez; Sugar Mountain in 2015; and writer-director Peer Pederson’s drama, We Don’t Belong Here (2017), with Anton Yelchin in his final film role.

Elwes reunited with director Rob Reiner for Being Charlie (2015), with Nick Robinson and Common, followed by a role opposite Penelope Cruz in Fernando Treuba’s period movie, The Queen of Spain (2016), with Javier Camara, Arturo Ripstein, Jorge Sanz, and Mandy Patinkin. In the same year, Elwes had his screenplay for Elvis & Nixon, about the meeting of the disgraced President and the revered rocker, filmed for Amazon Studios’ first theatrical release co-starring Michael Shannon and Kevin Spacey.

The next notable movie in Cary Elwes’s many credits is the Lina Roessler-directed comedy-drama, Best Sellers (2021), starring Michael Caine and Aubrey Plaza, and premiering at the Berlin Film Festival. Elwes played opposite Jason Statham, Plaza, Josh Hartnett, Bugzy Malone, and Hugh Grant in co-writer-director Guy Ritchie’s financially failed spy action movie, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023).

In another Berlin festival premiere, Elwes co-starred in Canadian producer-writer-director Matt Johnson’s well-reviewed biopic about the rise and fall of the once-revered electronic device, BlackBerry (2023), with Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, and Saul Rubinek. Another true story movie for Elwes was Sweetwater (2023), written and directed by Martin Guigui, starring Everett Osborne and Jeremy Piven, followed by Elwes’s first role in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), starring Tom Cruise and written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie.

Cary Elwes had a small supporting role in Zack Snyder’s space drama, Rebel Moon (2023), with Sofia Boutella, Charlie Hunnam, Djimon Hounsou, Jena Malone, Corey Stoll, and Anthony Hopkins. Filmmaker Ritchie cast Elwes in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2025), his film version of Damien Lewis’s history of a secret spy ring in WW2 run by Winston Churchill and author Ian Fleming, with Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, and Henry Golding.