Tom Burke is incapable of being dull. This is something the Academy Award–winning director Steven Soderbergh picked up on before casting him alongside Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender in his latest film, Black Bag.
But Burke wasn’t always so outgoing. Despite his role as the fearless, titular lead in the television adaptation of J. K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike crime series, Burke, growing up in an idyllic cottage in Kent, was painfully shy, struggling with severe dyslexia and insecurity, especially about the scar down his face from cleft-lip surgery. Even with all of this, his parents—Royal Shakespeare Company alumni David Burke and Anna Calder-Marshall—introduced him to the stage at a young age.
