Summary
Freya Allan’s career is still in its early stages, and she has already appeared in some major blockbuster movies and franchise television shows. Born on June 17, 2025, in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, Allan began her career in short films in 2017 before quickly making the leap to television. Though her first couple of roles were small, she still played important characters in these brief appearances. Her characters in those first few roles were consistently wiser than their age, often forced to quickly grow up in trying circumstances.
As she has aged Allan has continued to play wise and fiercely intelligent characters. At the same time,she has stopped playing children, and taken on the roles of leaders and heroes. It’s been a quick rise for Allan, who began her career as the “young” version of the more notable characters and is now a magical crown princess inThe Witcherand an important leader of the humans inThe Planet of the Apesfranchise. Allan can play a wide variety of roles in action, horror, and drama, and she’s already gotten some impressive performances under her belt.
The Witcher’s Ciri Actor Nailed The Impossible Challenge Facing Liam Hemsworth’s Geralt After Cavill’s Exit
The Witcher’s Freya Allan is aware of the challenges Liam Hemsworth is facing after Henry Cavill’s departure, and one, in particular, is impossible.
Creator
Miles Millar
Freya Allan’s first notable role after appearing in three short films was as Young Minerva in season 3, episode 5, “Chapter XXI: Carry Tiger to Mountain” ofInto the Badlands. In this AMC action drama set 500 years after a cataclysmic event that left civilization in ruin, a young boy and his warrior mentor journey through the dangerous feudal landscape together.Into the Badlandsis a science fiction, martial arts TV seriesand a post-apocalyptic drama.
Allan plays the young version of her character at age 14 and manages to capture the performance of Beecham, even if for only one sequence.
Minerva (Emily Beecham) is an upstart baron of the Badlands whose provinces produce crude oil. Allan plays the younger version of her character at age 14 and manages to capture the performance of Beecham, even if for only one sequence. It wasan early example of how well Allan could portray someone so young with hidden depths and sharp intelligence.
Into the Badlands
Cast
Into the Badlands follows Sunny (Daniel Wu) and M.K. (Aramis Knight), who traverse a post-apocalyptic world set 500 years in the future. Premiering in 2015, Into the Badlands was created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar and aired on AMC until 2019 when its third season came to a close.
Director
Craig Viveiros
There have been manyWar of the Worldsadaptations over the years, though surprisingly few have actually been set in Victorian-era England, where the original novel takes place. BBC’s 2019 miniseries brings the alien destruction to the story’s original setting as the classic tripods rise above early 20th-century homes. It’s a three-episode miniseries, and Allan only appeared in the first episode as Mary, a nurse.
AnotherThe War of the WorldsTV adaptation premiered in 2019, this one by Fox and StudioCanal, starring Gabriel Byrne and Daisy Edgar-Jones.
Despite only having a few scenes in the episode, Allan makes the audience care about the character. She’s a tough and intelligent nurse who seems like she will make it through the series, but her death after the arrival of the Tripods is both heartbreaking and sudden, and shows that no one is safe in the miniseries going forward. It’sa dire and bleak show, and Allan helps set that tone early on.
Navot Papushado
Gunpowder Milkshakeis an action thriller from Israeli filmmaker Navot Papushado, that follows young assassin Sam (Karen Gillian) who reunites with her estranged mother, Scarlet (Lena Headey), and her old assassin coworkers to finish one last job. It’s a stylish, non-stop action adventure that also includes some fantastic performances fromGunpowder Milkshake’s stacked cast. Freya Allan appears as the young Sam in the opening of the film.
The prologue ofGunpowder Milkshaketakes place in a diner years before the main events of the film. Young Sam is abandoned by her mother when assassins come to kill her, and Sam is left alone and traumatized, with just a milkshake. Once again, Allan does an impressive job matching Gillian’s speech patterns and the way she holds herself. Allan isexcellent as a young girl slowly realizing her mother is about to abandon her, deftly switching between fear, grief, and then angerthroughout the scene.
Gunpowder Milkshake
Gunpowder Milkshake is an action film that sees Karen Gillan as a woman following in her mother’s footsteps as an assassin. Abandoned at twelve years old, Sam has grown into a skilled assassin. However, after a job goes sideways after learning the truth about it, Sam decides to take up the vigilante route to save a kidnapped girl, resulting in an unexpected team-up with her estranged mother.
Felix Barrett
Dennis Kelly
The Third Day, a miniseries from HBO and Sky Atlantic, follows the journeys of Sam (Jude Law) and Helen (Naomie Harris), who each arrive at a mysterious island where the inhabitants practice mysterious and possibly sinister traditions.The Third Dayfamously featured a 12-hour livestream episodehalfway through the season that gave viewers a live look at the actors putting on a fictional festival. Freya Allan plays Kail in every episode of the six-episode series, save for the pilot.
Kail is a mysterious teenager on the island who tries to entice visitors to join the Osea community. She takes a particular interest in Ellie (Nico Parker), a young newcomer.Allan is tasked with delivering a lot of exposition in her role, but her ominous presence makes these speeches engrossing. She’s a terrifying and intense figure at first, but it’s her backslide into feeling regret after she really befriends Ellie that shows off Allan’s range.
The Third Day
The Third Day is a miniseries starring Jude Law and Naomie Harris. It follows three interconnected stories centering on an isolated island off the British coast, exploring themes of faith, trauma, and community. The series is divided into two parts: “Summer,” focusing on a grieving man’s experiences, and “Winter,” which centers on a mother’s search for answers.
Alberto Corredor
A starring role in a horror film is an excellent way for a young actor to get noticed by wider audiences. Freya Allan did just that when she appeared in 2023’sBagheadas Iris Lark. Iris is a young Scottish woman who is suddenly gifted her father’s pub in Germany after his untimely passing. She goes to the pub and quickly discovers there’s a monster there that, as owner of the pub, she can control and use to communicate with the dead. However, her overuse of the creature begins to exact a heavy toll.
Allan is front and center the whole movie and plays Iris as both a lost young woman willing to accept whatever strange gift her estranged father was willing to give and asa formidable scream queen. It’s never in question that Iris can’t handle herself, so even when the evil in the pub begins to become more overt, it makes sense that Iris would stick around and try to use the magic in the building to her benefit.
Wes Ball
ThePlanet of the Apesmovie franchiseis one of the more solid blockbuster franchises Hollywood has ever produced. Since the original 1968 film, there have been nine movies, ranging from creative and strange at worst to fantastic at best.Kingdom of the Planet of the Apesis probably somewhere in the middle, but it is still an excellent summer blockbuster. Freya Allan stars as Mae/Nova, a character who has been played by three other actresses, and is an underrated, famous fictional character.
The role requires physical stunts, quiet thoughtfulness, and ruthless brutality. Allan nails all three aspects of the character. When she speaks for the first time and Noa’s (Owen Teague) and Raka’s (Peter Macon) jaws drop, it’s funny but also moving.There’s intelligence and weariness to Allan’s dialoguethat makes her seem mature for the character’s age. It’s not easy to be one of the few humans acting against a bunch of CGI apes, but Allan creates a real connection with the VFX creatures.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Set several years after the events of War for the Planet of the Apes, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the next installment in the Apes saga. Ape clans have taken up residence in the oasis that Caesar sought to colonize, but humans have reverted to their animalistic nature in their absence. Now battling between enslavement and freedom, outliers in the Ape clans will take sides in a newly burgeoning society.
Lauren Schmidt Hissrich
Freya Allan’s co-starring role as Princess Cirilla “Ciri” of Cintra inThe Witcher, is what set up the actress as a major star. Based on the book series of the same name (that was also adapted into a video game),The Witcheris a fantasy drama series from Netflix that follows Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill), a magically enhanced monster hunter who is linked by destiny with Princess Ciri. Ciri is a powerful sorceress and warrior who has been trained by the most powerful teachers in the world ofThe Witcher.
The show is as much Ciri’s as it is Geralt’s, and Allan had to meet the expectations of book and video game fans when she took on the role in the highly anticipated series.Allan is equally at home in the action and the drama, and she delivers the complicated spells and lore of the show with confidence and authority. Fans are split on their feelings aboutThe Witcher, especially with Liam Hemsworth taking over the role of Geralt from Cavill, butFreya Allan’s role is not in doubt. She brings a stable, talented throughline to the ongoing show.
The Witcher
The Witcher, released in 2019, follows Geralt of Rivia, a mutated monster hunter navigating a turbulent world where humanity’s darker nature often eclipses the monstrous.
