Born: Boulder, Colorado, US in 1978.

Background: Although he was born in the US, the handsome young actor's family relocated to the UK when he was a baby. Growing up in London, he got the acting bug young and before he left school Field and his mates were performing Shakespeare in their local pub. Feild studied drama, and graduating in 1999, he immediately got some professional work in that starting place for many British actors, television's The Bill. He made his film debut in the Fred Schepisi adaptation of Graham Swift's novel Last Orders, playing a young version of Michael Caine's butcher and bar fly. Since then Feild has played a Russian submariner in Kathryn Bigelow's K:19 – The Widowmaker opposite Harrison Ford; the bag carrier in Peter Greenaway's multimedia project The Tulse Luper Suitcases; and, most recently, Joe Meek's lover and musical prodigy in Nick Moran's poptastic biopic Telstar.

What he's up to now: Feild's just finished two action movies, the live action remake of the Japanese anime Blood: The Last Vampire and Neil Dog Soldiers Marshall's Roman-era swords-and-sandals romp Centurion opposite Olga Kurylenko, Dominic West and Michael Fassbender.

What he says about Blood and Centurion: 'They're both very different films. I've done some action/fantasy work before, but nothing on the scale of Blood. It was wonderful to see the size and ambition of the project. It truly fuels your imagination. You become a big kid again. Blood took a huge amount of time because of the enormous scale in the shoot in two different continents, Asia and Europe. Centurion was made on a much smaller budget and we shot it very quickly. So each job is always a new challenge and full of wonderful surprises.'

Interesting fact: JJ, which stands for John Joseph, might be a cool-sounding professional name, but it is, in fact, what his family and friends call him.

Telstar is out now on selected release. Blood: The Last Vampire is on general release from Fri 26 Jun.