The highest-grossing British actor of all time
We know that British actors dominate the awards season, but what about the box office?
For years, Hollywood has had to face the existentially uncomfortable truth that the industry is no longer the domain of American movie stars. Daniel Day-Lewis, Kate Winslet, Cillian Murphy, and countless others are proving that, as usual, the Brits have an edge on the Americans, and the new cohort of up-and-comers suggests that there is no end in sight. With stars like Saoirse Ronan, Jodie Comer, and Florence Pugh, their American counterparts don’t have a chance.
When it comes to the box office, though, US stars are still on top. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been the driving force of Hollywood for nearly two decades now, and the group of actors that make it tick have been largely sourced from America. At the top of the heap for highest-grossing lead actors is Scarlett Johansson, whose ten highest-grossing movies contain seven MCU entries. Zoe Saldaña falls in second place, thanks to her involvement in both the Guardians of the Galaxy and Avatar franchises.
You have to go all the way down to the 14th highest-grossing actor to find someone from across the pond, and not surprisingly, that person is involved in the MCU. Falling just before the Harry Potter stars is Tom Holland, the most recent iteration of Spider-Man. At just 20 years old, he took on the red and blue suit of the arachnid hero and turned out to be more popular than either Andrew Garfield or Tobey Maguire in the role. His six MCU appearances account for nearly $10 billion in global box office earnings, a staggering number for such a young star.
Like many MCU actors, Holland had a promising career before he squeezed into brightly coloured lycra. His breakout role was in the hit stage musical version of Billy Elliot when he was barely a teenager, which he followed up with the harrowing climate change disaster movie The Impossible in 2014. Since the wild success of his Spider-Man movies, Holland has kept his career pretty low-key. He did a video game adaptation, a few animated movies, and a handful of more contained dramas like The Devil All the Time and The Crowded Room.
It’s likely that Holland will keep his position in the rankings for a while, given that he’ll be appearing in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming 2026 epic, The Odyssey, and yet another Spider-Man flick. However, he’s been pretty open about his ambivalence towards his career and has even said that he plans to quit the business altogether when he has kids. That leaves the door wide open for the next British actor on the list to surpass him, but that is so unlikely it’s basically impossible at this point.
So, who is the highest-grossing female British actor?
Holland is the highest-grossing British lead actor of all time, but just behind him is Emma Watson. This might come as a surprise. She’s only made a handful of feature films in the past decade, while Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, has worked pretty consistently. That said, the few films she has made were mostly box office successes, while Radcliffe’s have proven to be more of an acquired taste. Farting corpses and Weird Al Yankovic biopics do not, it turns out, make big bucks.
Believe it or not, Watson’s second-highest-grossing film is not part of the Potterverse. Beauty and the Beast, the live-action Disney remake, raked in $1.26 billion, just a bit shy of the $1.3 billion that The Deathly Hallows: Part II garnered. Darren Aronofsky’s bloated 2014 biblical epic Noah falls in 10th place as her second-highest-grossing non-Potter film.
Like Holland, Watson’s record seems pretty much guaranteed to topple at some point. She’s all but retired from the business of show, having appeared in precisely zero feature films since 2019’s Little Women. Karen Gillan seems poised to overtake her at some point in the near future. As a member of the MCU and the Jumanji franchise, the ascent of the Scottish star seems inevitable.
If you’re being a stickler (and why wouldn’t you be on a topic as pressing as this?), Gillan has actually been a supporting player in all of her highest-grossing movies, so there is an argument to be made that Watson’s not-so-coveted status as the second-highest-grossing British female actor is safe for the time being. We can all breathe a sigh of relief.
