Chloe Pirrie is an actress from Scotland. Her most distinguished role was in the film Shell (2012). She has also starred in The Game (2014), An Inspector Calls (2015), War & Peace (2016), Youth (2015), Stutterer (2015), The Living and the Dead (2016), Brief Encounters (2016), and The Crown (2017).
Early Life & Education
Chloe Pirrie was born on August 25, 1987, in Stockbridge, Edinburgh. She was a student at the Mary Erskine School.
She began her acting journey in school and decided to follow it as a career after being cast in a school performance of The Cherry Orchard. At 18, she moved to London to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, graduating in 2009.
Chloe Pirrie’s Career
Chloe Pirrie’s journey into professional acting began during her time as a waitress at a burger restaurant in London. She made her stage debut at the Royal National Theatre in the 2010 production of Men Should Weep.
Her breakthrough performance was in the feature film Shell (2012), a Scottish drama where she took on the role of the main character.
For her performance, she received the Most Promising Newcomer award at the British Independent Film Awards in 2013, and she was nominated for Best British Newcomer at the 2012 BFI London Film Festival Awards.
In 2013, she portrayed a politician in “The Waldo Moment,” an episode from the anthology series Black Mirror. Additionally, that same year, she was recognized as one of BAFTA’s “Breakthrough Brits.”
In 2014, Chloe Pirrie played a role in the BBC miniseries The Game, a Cold War spy thriller in which she acted as an MI5 secretary.
The next year, she was seen as Sheila Birling in Helen Edmundson’s BBC One adaptation of J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, in addition to her roles in the miniseries The Last Panthers, the British independent film Burn Burn Burn, and the Italian film Youth.
In 2015, she portrayed Ellie in the Academy Award-winning Best Live Action Short Film, Stutterer. She took on the role of Julie Karagina in the 2016 BBC miniseries War & Peace and was selected to play Emily Brontë in To Walk Invisible, a BBC drama centered on the Brontë family, created by Sally Wainwright.
Additionally, she appeared in the episode “In the Footsteps of a Killer” as Grace Matlock, a staff member at the Saint Marie Times in Death in Paradise.
Chloe Pirrie is known for her role as Lara in the 2016 BBC thriller series, The Living and the Dead. In 2017, she played Eileen Parker in the second season of the Netflix series The Crown.
In 2018, she appeared as Andromache in the miniseries Troy: Fall of a City, produced by the BBC and Netflix. In 2019, she took on the role of prosecutor Ella Mackie in the BBC thriller miniseries The Victim.
In 2020, she featured in Autumn de Wilde’s cinematic adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Emma, portraying Isabella Knightley, the older sister of the main character played by Anya Taylor-Joy.
Later that same year, she also took on the role of Alice Harmon, the biological mother of Beth Harmon (also portrayed by Anya Taylor-Joy), in the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit.
In 2025, Chloe Pirrie starred alongside Matthew Goode and Shirley Henderson in the leading role of hostage victim Merritt Linngard in the Netflix series Dept. Q.
