Chloe Pirrie
Chloe Pirrie is a Scottish actress. She is known for her performance in the 2012 film Shell, and more recently in the TV series Under the Banner of Heaven and Dept. Q. Other credits include the TV series The Game, War & Peace, The Living and the Dead, Brief Encounters, The Crown, The Queen's Gambit, Carnival Row, and Hanna ; and the films Youth, Blood Cells, Stutterer, and Emma.
Early life and education
Chloe Pirrie was born in Scotland in and raised in Stockbridge, Edinburgh. She attended the Mary Erskine School, an independent girls' school in Edinburgh.She began acting in school and decided to pursue it as a career after being cast in a school production of The Cherry Orchard. Pirrie moved to London at the age of 18 to attend the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, graduating in 2009.
Career
Pirrie's professional acting career began while she was working as a waitress in a London burger restaurant. She debuted at the Royal National Theatre in a 2010 production of Men Should Weep. Her breakthrough role came in the feature film Shell, a Scottish drama in which Pirrie played the eponymous main character. For this performance she won Most Promising Newcomer at the British Independent Film Awards 2013, and was nominated for Best British Newcomer at the 2012 BFI London Film Festival Awards. In 2013, she played a politician in "The Waldo Moment", an episode of the anthology series Black Mirror. In the same year she was named as one of BAFTA's "Breakthrough Brits",In 2014, Pirrie starred in the BBC miniseries The Game, a Cold War spy thriller in which she played an MI5 secretary. The following year she appeared as Sheila Birling in Helen Edmundson's BBC One adaptation of J. B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls, in the miniseries The Last Panthers, the British independent film Burn Burn Burn, and the Italian film Youth.
In 2015, she starred as Ellie in the Academy Award winner for Best Live Action Short Film, Stutterer.
She played Julie Karagina in the 2016 BBC miniseries War & Peace and was cast as Emily Brontë in To Walk Invisible, a BBC drama about the Brontë family created by Sally Wainwright. She also starred in episode "In the Footsteps of a Killer" as Grace Matlock, an employee at the Saint Marie Times in Death In Paradise.
She also played Lara in the 2016 BBC thriller series, The Living and the Dead. In 2017, she starred in the Netflix series The Crown, for its second season, playing Eileen Parker. In 2018, she appeared as Andromache in the BBC/Netflix miniseries Troy: Fall of a City.
In 2019, she appeared as prosecutor Ella Mackie in BBC's thriller miniseries The Victim.
In 2020, she appeared in Autumn de Wilde's film adaptation of Jane Austen's novel Emma as Isabella Knightley, elder sister of the titular character played by Anya Taylor-Joy. Later that year she also appeared as Alice Harmon, the birth mother of Beth Harmon, in the Netflix miniseries The Queen's Gambit.
In 2025, she appeared in the main cast for the first season of the Netflix series Dept. Q, portraying abducted Crown solicitor Merritt Lingard.