Netflix's thrilling new miniseries "The Queen's Gambit," about a young woman's quest to become a chess grandmaster (opens in new tab), has a familiar cast of faces. Horror queen Anja Taylor-Joy (opens in new tab) as the titular character, Beth Harmon; Marielle Heller, director of "Can You Ever Forgive Me." and "The Beauty Next Door," as her adoptive mother; Dudley Dursley, Beth's rival and one of her friends (aka Harry Melling), and "Love Actually" (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), who swapped his childhood singing skills for his chess "bad boy" cue.

Less well known but no less important to Beth's story is Jacob Fortune Lloyd, who plays D.L. Townes, another competitor, friend, and possibly Beth's love interest. Townes is a college-level chess player who appears several times throughout the series: he plays (and loses) Beth in her first chess tournament, in a one-on-one hotel room hangout that quickly becomes awkward, interviews and photographs her for a newspaper article, and eventually, in the reunites with the genius to support her in her fight against multiple Soviet grandmasters in the climax of the series.

Tawnes is one of Fortune-Lloyd's biggest on-screen roles to date, but thanks to his charming starring role in "The Queen's Gambit," there's no doubt he'll soon be showing up everywhere. But first, here's everything we already know about the actor.

Fortune-Lloyd is British, and after earning a BA in English literature from Oxford University, he attended the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. According to his Guildhall bio (opens in new tab), he speaks Italian and French, boasts impressive singing, dancing, and stage combat skills, plays multiple instruments, and can beatbox. He is also an avid sportsman who plays rugby, tennis, horseback riding, swimming, and soccer: "Actor, still going to be a soccer player."

The school's biography also notes that Fortune-Lloyd has a "strong ear for accents," which is clearly demonstrated in "The Queen's Gambit," where he replaced his Oxford English accent with a nearly perfect American English one.

While The Queen's Gambit is his most prominent role, Fortune-Lloyd has a recurring role on Medici as Francesco Salviati, an enemy of the Medici family, and he appeared in the 2015 Golden Globe-winning BBC/PBS mini-series Wolf Hall, and has also appeared on the BBC/PBS miniseries Wolf. On the big screen, you may have seen him in Agatha Christie's 2017 film adaptations of "The Crooked House" and "Star Wars: Skywalker Strikes Back," but unfortunately he has joined the series on the wrong side of history as an officer in the Sith fleet.

Off screen, Fortune-Lloyd is a prolific stage actor. In addition to the many roles he played while at Guildhall, he starred as Jack Worthing in the 2018 West End production of The Importance of Being Earnest, which received rave reviews (open in new tab), as well as the Royal He has also appeared in the Royal Shakespeare Company's productions of Othello and The Merchant of Venice.

Fortune-Lloyd has not actually been interviewed about his role in the hit miniseries, but his on-screen chess moves are backed by real expertise, according to his co-stars. In a recent interview (opens in new tab), Melling and Brodie-Sangster admitted that they had no idea what they were doing when they were moving the chess pieces in "The Queen's Gambit," but Fortune-Lloyd was "really good" and "properly agreed that they were "playing".

The co-stars did not mention whether Fortune-Lloyd arrived on set as a complete chess master or whether he learned to play specifically for the role, but complete immersion in the role is something of an M.O. for the actor. For example, in an interview on the set of "Medici" (opens in new tab), Fortune-Lloyd said that he achieved Salviati's particularly serpentine way of moving and speaking by studying literal snakes, especially Kerr from "The Jungle Book."

What we do know for sure, however, is that Fortune-Lloyd set at least one very important goal for his role in The Queen's Gambit. For one thing, when the show first aired, he posted a photo of himself with Taylor-Joy (opens in new tab) on Instagram with the caption, "Chess was always sexy, y'all just catching up." As if this wasn't enough, his Instagram bio concludes, "Bringing sexy back to chess." As countless Netflix users who have already watched every episode of this captivating series in the days since its premiere attest: mission accomplished.