Thomas Doherty immediately felt familiar, as if we had met before. The Scottish-born, New York-based actor called me from Amsterdam, where he was on vacation with his girlfriend, the Dutch model Yasmin Wijnaldum. The couple had just returned from the Monaco Grand Prix. “Have you ever been to Monte Carlo?,” Doherty asked me. His friendly, easygoing nature reminded me of his character from Hulu’s 2020 adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. Doherty played Liam, a 19-year-old heartthrob who has a fling with an older woman, played by Zoë Kravitz.
“I’m quite cheeky as a person,” said Doherty. This attitude was on display in High Fidelity and the 2021 reboot of Gossip Girl, in which he played Max, a wealthy 17-year-old playboy stuck in a love triangle.
As Doherty establishes his film career, he’s moving beyond these cheeky characters. For his latest role, Doherty stars in Dandelion, taking on his darkest and most vulnerable character yet. He plays Casey, a nomadic guitarist in South Dakota who falls in love with a struggling singer-songwriter named Dandelion, played by KiKi Lane. “I’m drawn to darkness,” said Doherty. “Casey is like my inside person and Max [is] my outside person.”
Doherty always knew he wanted to be an actor. “I was unconsciously acting before it became a conscious choice,” he explained. Growing up in Edinburgh, Doherty felt that every teenager got a label. Because he performed in plays at school, he was designated as “the actor.” In 2012, Doherty enrolled in the MGA Academy of Performing Arts, an Edinburgh-based college, where he studied musical theater for three years—although he already knew he wanted to work in film and television.
At 14, Doherty visited New York for the first time, on a family vacation. “When we got [to Manhattan], my neck hurt because I was just looking up at all of the buildings,” he said. He fell in love with the city and always dreamed of returning to work there. “Being from Scotland, you grow up and hear about these film sets” in America, he said.
For most of Doherty’s career, he’s stuck to big studio productions. Dandelion marks his indie-film debut. “It was the first time that I’d done a film where I had so much input,” he said. “There weren’t studios and streamers or anything, so it felt like our project.”
Doherty is already planning to do another independent film. He’ll never let go of the more lighthearted roles, though. He dreams of playing James Bond one day. “Dark and cheeky, there we go.”
Dandelion is in theaters now
Jeanne Malle is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
