Archie Renaux is well aware the world could be moments away from falling in love with him. But today, as he rubs at his eyes in the front seat of his car, it's hard for him to be sure. He keeps checking out his window—so, if a London parking enforcer walks by, he can rev the engine and drive off before they ticket him—and self-consciously switching his phone from hand to hand. He is neither shy nor particularly grandiose. A bit over six feet, his hair trimmed in a military cut, he has a leading man's sharp jaw, and the fans of his new Netflix series, Shadow and Bone, have already been despairing over it for months. Because, shit. That means I have to like Malyen Oretsev.
On April 23, Netflix drops the highly anticipated first season of Shadow and Bone, an adaptation of the massively popular book series by Leigh Bardugo. Renaux has arguably the most difficult task of the entire cast—bringing to life Mal, a deeply polarizing lead character from the books. After watching the final cut of this first season, Renaux wasn't sure what to make of it: "I remember looking over at my mum and asking, 'Gosh, am I good in this?'"
If you’re not already immersed in Bardugo’s sprawling Grishaverse books, here's a quick introduction: In Shadow and Bone, the world is inhabited by normal folk and Grisha (pronounced gree-shuh). These Grisha are super-powered humans who practice the “Small Science,” which means they can control water and fire, or stop hearts, or heal wounds, or perform all matter of other beguiling talents. But their world is threatened by the so-called Shadow Fold, a plume of pure darkness that slices through the land of Ravka and cuts off any easy opportunities for trade. Crossing the Fold is a life-threatening task—alas, those pesky volcra—but it must be done to keep the nation adrift. Army recruits travel through the Fold as part of a lottery system, and on one such morning, Malyen Oretsev—yes, our darling Archie—hears his name drawn.
Depending on whom you ask, Mal's best and worst trait is that he's dedicated to his lifelong friend Alina Starkov. Alina is Shadow and Bone’s hero, a young woman who discovers she is a Grisha capable of summoning light from her palms and, ostensibly, destroying the Fold. In the books, Mal, who is not Grisha, has a rather hard time reconciling the new, formidable Alina with the Alina he grew up with in a Ravkan orphanage. When it was just the two of them, she never demonstrated any particular talents, and certainly no preclusion for Grisha power. So when she's pulled into a world of palaces and politics and fancy coats called keftas, one might say Mal gets a tad resentful. When he and Alina are finally reunited, he can hardly speak to her. And fans have a lot of thoughts about that.
Spend a few minutes—alright, a few seconds—on Grishaverse Reddit, Tumblr, or even just Google it, and you’ll quickly recognize that the Mal/Alina romance (called "Malina") is a fraught one. Some fans consider it unhealthy. Others can't get enough. But frequently, when there's fandom hate to throw around, it’s Mal who takes the sting.
At least, that's how it was until Archie Renaux showed up.
"Of course he does have his flaws, but he's only human," Renaux says of Mal. "He's got a lot of pressure on his shoulders." What he doesn't mention is that Netflix's version of Mal was intentionally reshaped and placed into Renaux's capable hands, with the goal to make him a less controlling love interest for Alina. Showrunner Eric Heisserer has said the writers of the Netflix series intentionally set out to turn the show version of Mal into a character "who could be the perfect boyfriend that a lot of us would love to have." And Renaux might be the perfect person to change the minds of legions of passionate book readers.
Even before any fans had seen clips of his performance, the reluctant adoration started pouring in. Mere photos were enough to stoke passion, in all its colorful forms.
You'll learn quickly: Renaux has this sort of effect on people.
Renaux was raised in Tolworth, in a borough of London called Kingston upon Thames. He grew up playing soccer—he even refers to the sport as his first love, though that quickly became acting when he was cast in a primary school performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Relax, it was the “Junior” version.)
Although he auditioned thinking he’d get a middling role, he was surprised to be cast as one of the leads: Daniel Stoker, described as a “young, nerdish” assistant to the charismatic ex-rock star professor. Renaux ate it up.
He dove into drama lessons in secondary school with typical teenage zeal, but when graduation rolled around, he had little impetus to turn the hobby into a career. “I was too scared to actually go and do it because of how unpredictable the business can be,” he says. “Work can be really hard to come by sometimes. So I went and got an apprenticeship as an air condition engineer.”
The apprenticeship lasted long enough for him to realize he was not cut out to spend his days and nights tinkering with cooling units. In a sudden act of courage, or perhaps wild naïveté, he quit his job and started hustling for acting gigs. He began working on a building site to supplement his income while he auditioned, picked up an agent, and grabbed a few minimum-wage roles. And after one of his acting classes, a roaming scout noticed the obvious: Renaux is handsome. Uniquely so.
The scout took the young man aside after the session and told him he could make some some extra cash posing for a camera. Renaux took the advice—he capitalized on his thick eyebrows and full lips, signing on with AMCK models for a few shoots. He slipped into an animal-print skirt, black turtleneck, and socks stuffed into sandals. And he made it look natural. But it wasn't his calling.
“I didn't really enjoy it, to be honest with you,” he admits now. “It felt kind of empty for me.” At least it kept him aloft long enough to lure more meaningful work.
Acting began pulling him into its grip. Born Archie James Beale, he picked a stage name, Archie Renaux, in a tribute to his great aunt, Helen Renaux. He booked the film Voyagers, a kind of “Lord of the Flies in space.” It was met with underwhelming reviews, but it was work, real paying work. He was getting somewhere.
Next came Shadow and Bone. He didn’t actually pay any attention to the project when it first appeared as an audition option; he was too focused on nailing his tapes for Voyagers. But toward the end of shooting the film, his manager looped back around and proposed, “They still haven’t found the guy for this. Wanna do a tape?”
Renaux read the materials, did some Googling around the books. It sounded big. Lot of fans. Lot of noise. But perhaps most importantly, he, unlike so many others, actually liked Malyen Oretsev. He saw what the character could be, and more importantly, he understood what Netflix wanted to do with Mal. “There's certain times when reading a character's description, I need to instantly connect,” he says. “And there was something about Malyen's character that I was just like, oh my God. I think I can do a pretty good job with this.”
He jetted to Bucharest for a chemistry test with Jessie Mei Li, who plays Alina. After the read, it was like Mei Li already knew the two of them were meant for each other—they went on a walk and then out to lunch, where she told Renaux how stupendous the filming experience was sure t0 be. He urged her to slow down; he didn’t even have the part yet. He couldn't bear the thought of pumping himself up only for the role to slip through his fingers.
"I was getting excited, but still hadn't had the ball passed," he says. "But I think [the chemistry read] speaks volumes. We did just get on very easily."
Afterward, Mei Li and Renaux followed each other on social media, and the ever-attentive Shadow and Bone fandom took it for what it was: A clue. They noticed author Leigh Bardugo followed Mei Li, and Mei Li followed Renaux, and the two of them were listed as actors. So, put two and two together: They're part of the Netflix adaptation. Most fans guessed Renaux would play Kaz Brekker, the leader of the Six of Crows, a role that went to Freddy Carter. But, no, fans were looking at the reinvented Malyen Oretsev, the role many of them had openly crusaded against.
Renaux had no idea what to do with the sudden influx of attention: "My mum was saying, 'Oh, there's all these fans that are speculating about you being in the show.' And I was like, 'Oh my God.' And then, once the cast actually got announced, it got a bit wild, and I got like 10,000 odd followers overnight."
Mal stands out in the show as an otkazat'sya, a human with no Grisha powers. Unlike Kaz and his crew, he also has no particular gimmicks—he isn’t a sharpshooter like Jesper, a knife-throwing acrobat like Inej, or a clever con artist like Kaz himself. Instead, he’s a tracker, a subordinate in the First Army.
In Renaux’s mind, this makes Mal one of the most genuine characters of the series. He’s good-hearted. He’s devoted, perhaps, admittedly, to a problematic degree. “I think his central drive is always Alina,” Renaux says. “That is all he cares about because that is all he knows. At the beginning of the story that is really all he knows, that they grew up together in this orphanage and they have this incredibly strong bond.”
Which makes the entrance of Ben Barnes’s General Kirigan a bit of a thorn. Kirigan is otherwise known as the Darkling, a Grisha who leads the Second Army and can summon darkness from his fingertips; he is the opposite of Alina in the most pure sense of the word. Yet they are drawn to each other—like calls to like, as the books describe Grisha power—and quickly develop a hungry, sensual attraction. The Shadow and Bone fandom loves the pairing. “Darklina” versus “Malina” is a heated debate, the stuff of multi-thousand-word Tumblr posts.
Many fans take issue with how the Mal of the books seems threatened by Alina's power and success, as well as her interest in the Darkling. Mal's desire to "protect" her manifests in the trappings of toxic masculinity. The Mal of the show is decidedly different—his love for Alina is more earnest and empathetic.
Perhaps the most obvious demonstration of this is when Mal and Alina are eventually reunited, months after Alina is taken away to endure Grisha training at the so-called Little Palace. In the book, the two have a surprise encounter at the palace where they share a heated argument in which Mal accuses Alina of falling for the Darkling. The description reads, "Mal's lips twisted into a cynical smile, a smile so different from the one I knew and loved that I almost flinched ... 'Just admit it,' he sneered. 'He owns you.'"
Compare that with a scene from the Netflix series, in which they discuss the same romance:
"I made some stupid choices at the Little Palace," Alina says. "And he—"
"Hey, look, you don't owe me an explanation," Mal says, Renaux's lips quirked upward. His gaze betrays no anger. "I just want to keep you safe."
Bardugo credits Renaux for bringing Mal to life with such empathy. "I'm keenly aware of some of the things I would have done differently if I could go back [to writing my first book]," she told Esquire. "Shadow and Bone was my first book, and so there are things that I would shape differently in terms of us understanding Mal's journey and getting to see what he goes through."
Renaux's audition tape immediately stood out to Bardugo as this new television version of Mal.
"When we were initially looking at tapes for Mal, we could not find somebody who we all agreed on," she says. "Everybody was this kind of square-jawed teen idol type, and I didn't believe any of them. I didn't believe that any of them grew up in this orphanage. They weren't scrappers. And then Archie came on the screen, and I believed him. I believed that this person would do anything to survive and anything to make sure the people he loved survived. And I think that we, in some ways, shaped the role to that incredible conviction."
Still, that doesn't mean Renaux himself is all-in on Team Malina. Listen, believe it or not, he kinda gets the whole Darklina thing.
“If I take myself out of the series for a second, out of the actor playing Mal in the series, as an audience member … In Alina's case, there is that thing where Mal's like the familiar thing in her life,” he says. “And he’s like her home. And then all of a sudden, one of the most powerful people in this whole world is interested in her? It’s a very human thing to be interested in that. Wanting to explore that. So yeah, I get it.”
I tell him that’s a very diplomatic answer. He replies, dead serious, “I’m very open-minded. I guess I’m just empathetic toward how people are.”
Besides, he has other plans for Mal besides a romance with Alina. He has grand hopes for the scope of Season Two, and where it might lead Ravka’s best tracker.
“I'm really excited for the possibility of our characters exploring new lands in this world, different countries and being around different cultures,” he says. “Hopefully we will get to see that.”
Having watched the entirety of the first season now, Renaux says he feels “quietly confident” the show will be a success. What he’s less certain of, however, is if it will be a global phenomenon. And if it is, where does that leave someone like him? He’s not quite famous—not at the time of this interview, anyway. But he’s also not not famous either. And how will audiences receive him as Mal, the much-maligned romantic interest whom some fans go so far as to call “abusive” while others deem him “pure”? How will they react to the new Mal, and if they love him, does Renaux get a portion of that love? How much of it does he really want?
Last year, Renaux and his girlfriend welcomed a daughter, and Renaux shared a few happy photos of her online. He was somewhat alarmed when, months later, he would find those photos shared by random fan accounts around the internet. Something struck him—people were paying attention to him in a way they hadn’t before. Shadow and Bone was a different sort of project, with a different sort of audience. Fans kept track of his every post, dissected his tweets, saved old photos from his modeling days. They collected clips of him shirtless and edited them into thirsty TikToks. And that influence would impact his family.
“I was talking to my girlfriend about this,” he says. “We're getting closer and closer to this date. There is that possibility of [Shadow and Bone] just being absolutely massive. And then for my life, like how I live personally and for that all to just drastically change after. That's quite a weird thought.
“If I put a photo of my friends or my baby, for instance? Like, all my baby photos are all on film or in a photo album somewhere on my parents’s shelves or in their attic or loft. But my baby, she didn't ask her baby photos to go about the internet. So that thought process led me to think, maybe I'm going to keep everything private. Me being an actor, coming with that, is like being in the public eye. So that's fine, but everyone else that I'm around didn't ask for it. So I'm not going to put them out there.”
But though he’s chosen to protect his loved ones from a notoriously hungry fandom, Renaux himself has little choice but to bear the waves of adoration (or frustration) being hurled at him as the new and improved Malyen Oretsev makes his Netflix debut. With that sort of resolve—and, let’s be honest, that intoxicating twinkle in his eye—Renaux just might make Mal the most-liked character in the series. Good luck trying to resist.
Photographs by Joseph Sinclair.
Styling by Krishan Parmar.
Hair by Kieron Webb, The London Barber.
Skin by Lauren Kay.
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