Mark Lewis Jones is a Welsh actor born in Rhosllannerchrugog, near Wrexham, in the mid-1960s. He began acting as a teenager with the Clwyd Youth Theatre and trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. His earliest screen credits, including the 1985 comedy Morons from Outer Space, list him simply as "Mark Jones" — the name under which this site originally profiled him.
Jones built a strong stage career, performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company and at Shakespeare's Globe in London, alongside numerous Welsh theatre roles at venues including the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff. Through the 1990s he took character roles across British television, including A Mind to Kill, Soldier Soldier, This Life and Casualty.
He has gone on to become one of Wales' most recognisable character actors internationally. Television audiences know him as Rob Morgan in the BBC comedy-drama Stella (2012-2017), Steve Baldini in the BBC Wales drama Keeping Faith (2017-2020), and Dr Edward Millward — the real-life Welsh tutor to a young Prince Charles — in Netflix's The Crown. He played General Vladimir Pikalov in the acclaimed HBO/Sky miniseries Chernobyl (2019), Tom Christie in Outlander from 2022, and appeared in Game of Thrones as Shagga. On the big screen he played First Order Captain Moden Canady in Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), having previously auditioned unsuccessfully for The Force Awakens.
Jones won the BAFTA Cymru award for Best Actor for the 2015 film The Passing (Yr Ymadawiad) and received a Fellowship from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in 2022. In 2025 he was inducted into the Gorsedd at the National Eisteddfod of Wales, held that year in Wrexham, close to his home town.