Llewellyn "Wells" Sébastien Rhys Gravenor (born 12 February 1989) is a Welsh film and television actor. He is best known for his role as Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter film series, as Connor Walsh in the current ABC legal drama, "How To Get Away With Murder", and as the titular character in the upcoming Marvel Comics series, "Iron Fist".

   EARLY LIFE   Gravenor was born in Paris, France, and raised in the city of Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom. He is the first and only son of Élise-Simone Cadieux, film producer and current communications director of the Cannes Film Festival. Cadieux hails from a long line of French film industry luminaries, and had also previously worked as a casting director, involved in several prominent films for the BBC. His father, Arnall Gravenor, is a former investment banker, from what Gravenor has described as "an annoyingly humble-posh" family in southern Wales. In a 2009 interview, Gravenor spoke of his father's post-retirement hobby of gardening as "disgustingly quaint", and that they've won an "embarrassing amount of awards" for the family's private gardens in Cardiff. He also has a younger sister, former model Gillian Allard (née Gravenor), a design assistant for Lanvin, who currently works on their tailoring contract with London-based football club, Arsenal FC. The two also have half-siblings from his father's previous marriage, and though Gravenor has painted his family as "an odd little unit", his parents were never married.

  Named for his paternal grandfather, Gravenor has called his nickname and eventual stage name "very necessary", and that "even [his] own mother has difficult pronouncing [Llewellyn] proper[ly]". In Welsh, ll creates a voiceless lateral fricative, which can be difficult to pronounce, even with the simplified English substitution of chl (as in "loch"). When Gravenor himself has said his given name aloud, he's either subtly used the proper Welsh, or used the generally accepted pronunication of ll as simply representing one l. Though he's been coy on why he'd chosen "Wells" and where it came from, in an early Harry Potter interview from 2004, Gravenor shed a bit more light on the subject. "It's such a dad thing to come up with dreadful pet names, right? Mine always went around all, 'Wells this' and 'Welly that', and I spent all of school fighting off all the worst nicknames my name's got to offer [...] I suppose I came out alright with the most decent one in the end." In a recent Twitter Q&A, he mentioned he'd almost gone by "Lew", but "tossed it aside, in a sense of misplaced Welsh pride." He added, however, that being called Lew by Marianne Faithfull on the set of Paris, Je T'aime when he was seventeen was "one of the greatest things ever." He remains credited as "Llewellyn Gravenor" in the early Potter films, as he hadn't gone by Wells professionally until 2005, with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban being the first. Though he's occasionally asked, he's never changed it legally.

   CAREER   Despite his mother's then-career as a casting director, Gravenor never expressed interest in acting as a child, which he's often claimed continues to this day. Since as early as five years old, he took on small modelling gigs and commercials, and has recalled that he "liked dressing up" but "at the time, I almost would've rather played sport or something, if you could believe it." Naturally, when the script for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was being passed around British child actors in the appropriate age range, Gravenor's mother couldn't help but encourage then-eleven-year-old Wells to audition for the iconic titular role. Expecting nothing to come of it, he was indeed turned down, but instead offered the role of the hapless series comic relief of sorts, Neville Longbottom. Many interviews in the early Potter films liked to cheekily bring up this fact, as it somewhat mirrors his character's own "near-miss" in not being "the boy who lived", though Gravenor has insisted multiple times that he was actually relieved to be turned down for such an important role, and at the time, he hadn't even read any of the Potter book series.

  Though self-described as "entirely ill-prepared for this new life as an inexperienced actor thrust into an immensely popular international film franchise for half [his] life" on his personal tumblr blog, Gravenor seemed to find solidarity and grew incredibly close with his Harry Potter castmates, as they all essentially spent their formative years together. As many of the core Potter cast can attest, however, adjusting to life after the series' conclusion proved a bigger challenge than during, especially for Gravenor, given he'd originally never planned on or even was much interested in being an actor, and the role he'd played for a decade was, aside from a few very minor roles elsewhere, all he'd known at the time. He's described the financial and creative freedom of post-Potter life, when asked his plans: "It's mad, right? I've made it through my most awkward stage of life with everyone watching, and now I've no reason to work again unless I want to. So, I suppose I'm off to throw money about the pub and read some really dodgy scripts, yeah?" He's said on multiple occasions that acting (along with singing) is simply something he "found [himself] good at", and claims he has little passion in it, beyond "satiating [his] own boredom by doing whatever [he wants]." In several interviews at the Cannes Film Festival (of which his mother is the standing communications director), while promoting Lars Von Trier's controversial Nymphomaniac, Gravenor smirked that he liked to take roles that would most effectively disappoint his mother - "without whom the Potter whirlwind of [his] life would be possible" - as a sort of playful revenge that endures to this day.

  Having been partially raised in Paris and thus being fluent in French has afforded Gravenor the freedom to take on French films as well, which grew to embrace and almost prefer as a break from the Potter series. Along with his debut French film Les Choristes, he also had a small role in Gus Van Sant's segment "La Marais" of the 2006 anthology film, Paris Je T'aime, where he played a young artist attempting to flirt with a young American man, not knowing he doesn't speak French. To his slight dismay, this gained him a particular amount of attention within the Harry Potter fan community, due to the subject matter, and because many simply didn't know he spoke the language. He went on to take a small role in Lisa Azuelos' French teen comedy, LOL, and later starred in Michel Leclerc's 2012 comedy, Télé Gaucho / Pirate TV, as his first major role after the conclusion of the Potter series. During its promotion, he found many did not seem to recognize him from his earlier work: "It's weird, it's like I'm practically anonymous in French now, it's right fun."

  As he'd allegedly found the accent difficult and didn't want to "stick out as a British sore thumb", Gravenor mostly avoided American roles - until the right one seemed to come along for him in the form of Ryan Murphy's anthology "American Horror Story". After a lengthy audition process, Gravenor accepted a significant role in the forth season mini-series, subtitled "Freak Show", as "Lobster Boy" Jimmy Darling. He cites this role as his most challenging to date, requiring not only acting skills he's nearly never had the chance to exercise previously, but also a southern American accent, and hand prothetics. Despite that, and casting announcement anecdotes of how he was "more frightened of the role than the subject matter", Gravenor has said on multiple occasions that this was his favorite part he'd ever taken, and he "didn't regret a single moment of it." The season was very well-recieved, becoming FX's most-watched program in its history, and earned twenty Emmy Award nominations, including Outstanding Limited Series.

  Earlier that year in 2014, he'd taken on the role of duplicitious law student Connor Walsh, in fledgling ABC legal drama, "How To Get Away With Murder", helmed by famed ABC showrunner Shonda Rhimes. The series began as a nine-episode "trial", and was originally considered a limited series, due to Viola Davis' filming schedules of other projects. Because of this, Gravenor's described Shonda Rhimes and the production crew to be "really welcoming, yet really accomodating of our individual careers and schedules. And that's brilliant to have in a cast basically full of young actors." Gravenor was photographed partying and celebrating in New Orleans, while nearly wrapped on "American Horror Story: Freak Show" in October 2014, when "How To Get Away With Murder" was picked up as a full series. He claims that though he'd never doubted getting picked up, he was pleasantly surprised. "I'm excited, and I can't imagine why. My life's about to be a whole lot busier." Gravenor's recieved a lot of praise for his portrayal of the smirky and unapologetically gay law student, and has become a fan favorite on the show, which itself has been honored with many acknowledgements from the NAACP and GLAAD, along with Viola Davis' Primetime Emmy Awards win for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series, and two SAG Awards for the same. The series' third season renewal was announced on March 3, 2016.

  In March 2016, Gravenor was confirmed as being cast as Daniel Rand, the titular character, in Netflix's upcoming Marvel series "Iron Fist", by showrunner Scott Buck. His casting was the final piece of the principal cast of Netflix's collection of series featuring The Defenders, along with Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones. Despite the inevitable criticism that comes with casting any live-action comic book adaptation, Buck defended Gravenor's casting: "Danny Rand is a a billionaire New York Buddhist monk martial arts superhero who’s still trying to figure out what exactly that all means, he's very complicated. Wells is able to play all these levels in such an honest, revelatory way that as soon as I saw him I knew he was our Danny." Gravenor has made little comment on the announcement thus far, but has very often alluded to and complained about assumedly related training and gym time on social media. Production has not yet begun on the series, but is slated for premiere in November, 2016, though it's also been rumored and likely that his character may be introduced in the upcoming "Luke Cage" series first.

   CONTROVERSIAL PROJECTS   Gravenor's announcement as Iron Fist in the upcoming Netflix series of the same name was met with mild controversy over the apparent "whitewashing" of the role, in light of early reports that Marvel had met with several Asian-American actors initially. Online news source, The Root, criticized his casting: "[...] 'white man who masters the culture, skills and talents of exotic foreigners and then saves the day' is the movie trope that just won’t die." Yet, many were quick to point out that the Daniel Rand of the comics is indeed white, and have argued that the already notably progressive Marvel Universe has no obligation to "course correct" in this scenario. The debate remains ongoing on the internet, as is typical of any high-profile comic book adaptation in production.

  In January 2015, Gravenor starred in a music video for Sia's solo version of "Elastic Heart", from her album 1000 Forms of Fear, alongside then-thirteen-year-old dancer Maddie Ziegler. The clip, co-directed by Sia herself, features the pair clad only in dirt-smeared, flesh-colored dancewear, "dance-fighting" and emotionally reacting to one another's interpretive movements in a giant metal cage. It was nominated for the 2015 VMA for Best Female Video and selected by Billboard and Vulture as one of their best music videos of the year, and recieved more than 570 million views on Youtube as of March 2016. Despite all the accolades, however, many critics took issue with the depiction of a male adult and a female child dancing together, percieving it as pedophilic. Sia eventually apologized for the misunderstanding: "All I can say is Maddie and Wells are two of the only actors I felt could play these two warring 'Sia' self states. I apologize to those who feel triggered by 'Elastic Heart'. My intention was to create some emotional content, not to upset anybody." Gravenor has never commented himself about the controversy directly, though admitted in a recent Twitter Q&A that he's a "dreadful dancer" and "had to work out an awful lot for all that", given that climbing up the cage was "real shit, all me". That aside, he also called the clip as a whole "truly raw and beautiful".

  Gravenor's role in Lars Von Trier's epic art film Nymphomaniac also drew controversy, due to the film's promise of "intense unsimulated sex scenes" and the misunderstanding of what that meant. During the 2012 Cannes Film Festival (of which his mother is the communications director), Gravenor fueled the intrigue by vaguely speaking of this unusual feature: "Everything's happening in the film. When I first read the script, there's this massive disclaimer at the top, saying this is all real, all of it. What's illegal's getting blurred, but it's all happening. And it's right terrifying, you know? Von Trier is utterly mad, completely dangerous, and I fucking love it." Whilst promoting the film, Gravenor tweeted a video clip of the aforementioned interview, with simply "Hi, Mom" as commentary. Needless to say, though the sex scenes of Nymphomaniac were indeed unsimulated, the film featured body doubles superimposed with the actors' performances.