Connor Jessup

Connor William Jessup (born June 23, 1994 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian actor, director, and filmmaker whose career began at the tender age of eleven. After an early stage role in a production of The Full Monty he landed a lead on the children’s series The Saddle Club, even contributing the plot for one episode, which demonstrated his nascent storytelling instincts. By 2005 he was already appearing in television roles and, shortly thereafter, took on executive‑producer duties for the independent film Amy George, which screened at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. His breakout television role arrived in 2011 when he was cast as Ben Mason on the TNT science‑fiction series Falling Skies, a part he inhabited for five consecutive seasons, earning a reputation for portraying resilient, nuanced characters. In the years that followed he delivered a critically acclaimed performance as a troubled teen in the Canadian indie film Blackbird (2012), a movie that collected multiple awards at TIFF, the Atlantic Film Festival, and Vancouver International Film Festival, and even screened at Cannes. The actor’s momentum continued with the award‑winning Closet Monster (2015), which secured the Best Canadian Film award at TIFF, and with a compelling turn as Taylor Blaine (and later Coy Henson) in the Emmy‑winning anthology American Crime (2016‑2017). Most recently he starred as Tyler Locke in Netflix’s adaptation of Locke & Key (2020‑2022), cementing his status as a versatile performer across genre and platform. Connor Jessup has repeatedly expressed a desire to expand beyond acting; in 2014 he appeared in the short Fragments, and in 2015 he wrote, directed, and premiered his own short Boy at TIFF, a project funded by bravoFACT. Recognized by Filmmaker magazine as one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2016, he continued to hone his craft with shorts such as Lira’s Forest (2017) and the documentary profile of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2018). His 2019 production work on the omnibus 30/30 Vision: 3 Decades of Strand Releasing showcased his curatorial eye, while his most recent short, Julian and the Wind, premiered at TIFF in September 2024. Influenced by Japanese cinema and auteurs like Hirokazu Kore‑eda, Yasujirō Ozu, and Hayao Miyazaki, Jessup’s artistic vision blends narrative depth with visual poetry, promising an evolving legacy both in front of and behind the camera.