If Cool Britannia really is back, as Tatler has declared, then no man is better positioned to represent the Brit-culture renaissance than Corey Mylchreest. This month, the 27-year-old London native is starring in the new romance film My Oxford Year, as well as in Hostage, the political thriller starring Julie Delpy, both streaming on Netflix.
Mylchreest made his television debut in the 2022 DC Comics vehicle The Sandman. And it’s no coincidence he landed the part of Adonis—he is, admittedly, rather good-looking. The following year, he took on the lead role of the young King George III in Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, Shonda Rhimes’s highly anticipated Bridgerton prequel.
Mylchreest is a Brit through and through. After meeting in Manchester, his parents moved to East London in 1995. Still there today, his father, a Liverpool native, works as a psychiatric nurse for the National Health Service, and his mother, a Yorkshire native, is a violist. While Mylchreest has always called London home, his northern heritage runs deep. “I was wearing a Liverpool kit before I knew what football kits were,” he tells me.
His career has been over a decade in the making, but no one moment sealed his decision to pursue his thespian ambitions. “It would be nice to have a story about a watershed moment, decision-wise, but it really was gradual,” he says. He must have had an inkling, having attended Guildhall, the renowned London performing-arts school, from the ages of 13 to 18. Even there, however, he still wasn’t dead set on a life onstage.
It was his mother who encouraged him to explore a creative path. “You should do the thing in your life that makes the hours feel like minutes and the minutes feel like seconds,” he recalls her saying. And the more time he spent acting, the more it became clear to him that “it was the most fun I had doing anything.”
After leaving Guildhall in 2016, Mylchreest enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, widely known as RADA, from which he graduated in 2020. That’s when “it all got serious.”
By his final year, the pieces of Mylchreest’s career had started falling into place. Impressed by his stage work, an agent approached him after a school performance and soon began sending him to auditions. One of them, for the pilot episode of The Sandman, would turn out to be more than just a line on his résumé. When he began auditioning for Queen Charlotte in 2022, the show’s director and executive producer, Tom Verica, had already called Mike Barker, who’d directed the Sandman episode, to get the scoop on his prospective King George. Luckily, Verica liked what he heard, namely, says Mylchreest, “that I wasn’t an idiot or nasty.” It was that information, he adds, “that helped me get over the last yard.”
Two years later, My Oxford Year sees Mylchreest go from mad king to madly in love. The film is directed by Iain Morris, the co-creator of the beloved British coming-of-age show The Inbetweeners, and stars Sofia Carson as Anna, a girlbossy American studying poetry at Oxford University for one year before returning to New York, where she has a job lined up at Goldman Sachs. Mylchreest plays Jamie Davenport, one of Anna’s tutors, who happens to be charm itself, driving a vintage convertible, reciting Tennyson off the cuff, and bringing cake into his first class to use as a metaphor for carpe diem. I’ll leave it to the viewer to find out whether Anna learns to live a little (and eats Jamie’s cake.)
Mylchreest is also starring in Hostage, a series premiering on August 21, about a nail-biting political-hostage negotiation between the British prime minister (Suranne Jones) and the French president (Delpy). Mylchreest plays the president’s activist stepson, a role that granted him a front-row seat to Delpy’s acting prowess—but not without nerves. “I was quite scared of her. She’s a titan of the work and the industry,” he says. “She can do the thing which I can’t yet, which is hold a normal conversation before the cameras roll. You’ll be in a scene with her and suddenly she’s just saying the lines. You just get to watch it happen [and] have eyes on the secret that no one else sees.”
Distance and time may now separate Mylchreest from his drama-school days, but the formative years still remain with him. “The things that we’re taught are really lessons for life,” he says, “being in the present moment, not judging yourself, and keeping that attention on the other person, rather than focusing on yourself.”
My Oxford Year is available for streaming on Netflix. Hostage will premiere on Netflix on August 21
Victoria Herman is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
