David Oakes


Rowan David Oakes is an English actor and environmentalist. He is best known for his roles in the series The Pillars of the Earth, The Borgias, The White Queen and Victoria and for his discursive Natural History podcast, Trees A Crowd.

Early life and education

Oakes was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire in 1983, the son of Jeremy Charles Oakes, a Church of England canon and Fiona Brockhurst, a professional musician. He grew up in Fordingbridge, Hampshire.
Oakes was head boy at Bishop Wordsworth's School, in Salisbury, where he was also heavily involved with the Salisbury Playhouse and their youth theatre, Stage 65. He graduated with a First in English Literature from the University of Manchester.
He attended the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School from 2005 to 2007.

Career

David began his career at Shakespeare’s Globe, before taking roles at the Almeida Theatre and the Old Vic, but he came to prominence when he played the villainous William Hamleigh in the television miniseries The Pillars of the Earth, produced by Ridley Scott's production company. David was present to accept the Jury Prize at the 2011 Romy Awards in Vienna alongside Donald Sutherland and Natalia Wörner.
The following year, Oakes was cast in the television series The Borgias, airing on Showtime. He played Juan Borgia opposite Jeremy Irons. Whilst shooting the second season, David performed a cameo in the sequel to The Pillars of the Earth, World Without End.
Continuing a career on television playing morally dubious characters, Oakes had a role in The White Queen for BBC One and Starz playing George, Duke of Clarence. It was broadcast in mid-2013.
In an attempt to distance himself from his "TV Period Bad Boy" image, in 2013 David played Mr Darcy in an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice at Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park. He said, "I've been playing bad guys back to back, so Darcy's a bit of an antidote!" He followed this by more stage work, appearing in the world premiere of Shakespeare in Love at the Noël Coward Theatre as Christopher Marlowe.
In a return to TV period dramas in 2015, Oakes guest-starred in both the third season of Endeavour with Shaun Evans and in BBC's limited series The Living and the Dead with Colin Morgan.
The role of Prince Ernest, brother of Queen Victoria's husband Prince Albert, went to Oakes in 2016 in the ITV series Victoria. The role reunited Oakes with his Trinity co-star Tom Hughes, and Pillars of the Earth co-star Rufus Sewell.
In 2017, Oakes starred in the film adaptation of Albert Sánchez Piñol's novel Cold Skin, directed by Xavier Gens and co-starring Ray Stevenson and Aura Garrido. He also starred as Thomas Novachek in the London West End premiere of David Ives's play Venus in Fur at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. This production was directed by Patrick Marber and co-starred Natalie Dormer as Vanda.
In 2019, Oakes continued his love for playing in open air venues by playing Hamlet at Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre, York. Critics were united in their praise of his Hamlet, saying that he “plays Hamlet with natural ease: he is clearly comfortable with the cadences of the language and he conveys meaning well.” “David Oakes’s interpretation of the Danish Prince is charming, clever and quick-witted...”, “...establishes an excellent rapport with the audience... and his final rising to the role of hero-avenger is splendidly done...” and that his performance was ”...elegant in movement, golden tongued, sometimes still, yet as likely to surprise as quicksand, witty, bright yet brittle.”

Television

Film

Radio

Oakes has directed a number of theatre pieces alongside his acting career. In 2003 he took a stage adaptation of The Wicker Man to the Epping Forest Theatre Festival. Rehearsing in and around his hometown of Salisbury, Oakes "got kicked out of the Close for rehearsing pagan rituals for open-air production of The Wicker Man."
At University he directed numerous plays including Martin McDonagh's Beauty Queen of Leenane, Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter and Anthony Minghella's Whale Music.
Also whilst at University in 2005, Oakes assisted director Natalie Wilson on a production of Smilin' Through that was co-produced by the Truant Company, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and Contact Theatre, Manchester. Later that year, Oakes once again turned to literary adaptation, taking a production of Stephen King's The Boogeyman to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
With his and Bell's theatre company, Dog Ate Cake, in 2009 Oakes directed a small tour revival of John Maddison Morton's Box and Cox.
Oakes frequently directs at Shakespeare's Globe extending their "Read Not Dead" series, a study devoted to performing fully staged readings of the entirety of the Early Modern Canon of Drama. Most recently Oakes directed Robert Greene's The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Lewis Theobald's "Happy Ending" version of John Webster's Duchess of Malfi, "The Fatal Secret".
David recently directed an extract of Robert Daborne's A Christian Turn'd Turk as part of a special "Read Not Dead" event at Shakespeare's Globe. Four directors with four scholars were teamed up with actors and presented their arguments and selected scenes at a special hustings event on Thursday 29 May 2014. Winning the event, teamed with Dr Emma Smith of Oxford University, Oakes directed the full play on Sunday 5 October 2014 in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

Podcasts

In February 2018, David was interviewed for the PBS Masterpiece Podcast in relation to his role in Victoria. On 17 February 2019 David appeared on the ‘Smashing Sundays’ podcast - hosted by Lucy Pinder and, David's Co-star from ‘Foiled’, Beth Granville.
In 2020, David narrated an episode of Historic Royal Palaces' 'Outliers' podcast. He appeared as Thomas Phelippes, a spy and code breaker in the court of Elizabeth I plotting the downfall of Mary, Queen of Scots.

The '[Trees A Crowd]' Podcast

David is the presenter of the Natural History podcast, 'Trees A Crowd'. The first episode was released on 25 February 2019 and featured Mark Frith.
David is an environmentalist and an ambassador for the Woodland Trust. His podcast Trees A Crowd is a series of informal conversations with artists, scientists and enthusiasts; a mutual celebration of the beauty of the environment and the way it inspires them as human beings. Each episode explores how the countryside has inspired their careers as they reflect on how growing up within the natural world became working for the natural world. Growing up in the New Forest and the Purbeck Jurassic Coast, David Oakes launched this podcast as a passion project to explore his lifelong fascination with the wild people and the wildlife that makes our planet its home.
Oakes plays both the clarinet and bass clarinet, and is a strong bass singer.
He is an avid follower of folk music, and continues to support the Bristol folk group Sheelanagig.
He has an extensive collection of canoes and is currently developing a comedy pilot based on this interest. His preferred canoe method is kayak but he also enjoys Canadian canoeing.

Art

Oakes is an avid fine line sketcher. He is increasingly known for sketching on-set animals upon coloured pages of script reissues and giving them to production members. In May 2015 he exhibited as part of the Dulwich Artists Open House Festival alongside artist and designer Sarah Hamilton. He has also contributed a chapter on Charity Cards for Ms Hamilton's book, House of Cards.

Charity Work and Advocacies

[British Lung Foundation]

David, following his infant niece being diagnosed with a lung condition, has been heavily involved with raising awareness for and fundraising on behalf of the British Lung Foundation.
In 2013, Oakes collaborated with his Borgias castmate Holliday Grainger to make the short comedy film "Goblin". Directed by Christian James, the film was screened at the 2014 Film 4 Fright Fest in their Shorts Showcase, and all profits from the sale of this film were donated to the British Lung Foundation.
Later in 2014, Oakes ran the length of the country to raise awareness for infant lung diseases for both the British Lung Foundation and ChILD Lung Foundation UK. More recently he joined with the BLF to promote their new Children's Hub to provide families with information and support.
Alongside this, in 2016, 2017 & 2018 he created the charity's Christmas card.

Arts charities: [Anno's Africa] & [Shakespeare Schools Festival]

Since 2014, Oakes has also been a friend of Anno's Africa, an arts-based charity working with Kenyan orphans and slum children, and has supported the UK based Shakespeare Schools Festival, most notably with and surrounding their "Trial of Macbeth" and "Trial of Richard III". In 2019, David helped organise, and alongside Michael Palin, Twiggy and others, appeared in the ‘Just A Book’ poster campaign on the London Underground. The campaign was created to support independent businesses and bookshops on British highstreets and also to raise funds for Anno’s Africa.

The [Woodland Trust] and Environmental Activism

Since 2019, David has been an Ambassador for the Woodland Trust. On October the 9th, 2019, David hosted a discussion at the 70th Cheltenham Literature Festival on the subject of "The Art of Trees". In the press release for the event, David said:
Writing in an editorial for the Sunday Times on the 2nd of November, 2019, David said:
On Thursday the 30th of January 2020, David was a co-signatory, with the CEOs of The Wildlife Trusts, the National Trust, the Woodland Trust, the RSPB, the World Wide Fund for Nature, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Buglife and Butterfly Conservation, and other notable environmental ambassadors and activist, on a letter written to Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and published in The Times, to get the UK government to rethink its stance on the second UK High Speed Rail Link along environmental and biodiversical lines.
On the 21st June, 2020, David co-hosted the live-stream event, The Big Wild Quiz, for The Wildlife Trusts as part of their “30 Days Wild” campaign. And 9 days later, on the 30th of June, alongside environmentalists and activists, including Chris Packham and Ellie Goulding, David took part in the Climate Coalition's mass virtual lobby to focus the MPs to put people, climate and nature at the heart of the British nation’s recovery.