Television fans know him as the patient schemer Earl Godwin in Netflix’s Vikings: Valhalla, and as a run of polished villains in The Pillars of the Earth, The Borgias and The White Queen. David Oakes is a British actor from Salisbury who has spent almost two decades in period drama, while also building a second life as an ecologist, nature podcaster and Vice President of The Wildlife Trusts. Off screen, he shares two daughters with Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer, whom he met on a West End stage in 2017.
| Date of Birth | October 14, 1983 |
|---|---|
| Age | 43 years |
| Nationality | British |
| Zodiac Sign | Libra |
| Occupation | Actor, ecologist, podcaster |
| Full Name | Rowan David Oakes |
| Hometown | Fordingbridge, Hampshire |
| Education | University of Manchester; University of Exeter; Bristol Old Vic Theatre School |
| Partner | Natalie Dormer (civil partnership, February 2023) |
| Children | Two daughters |
| Known For | The Pillars of the Earth, The Borgias, Victoria, Vikings: Valhalla |
| Podcast | Trees A Crowd |
Bella Nwanneka EbinumBiography
Rowan David Oakes was born on October 14, 1983, in Salisbury, Wiltshire. He grew up a few miles south in Fordingbridge, on the edge of the New Forest in Hampshire. “I grew up in Fordingbridge, so I’m a New Forest boy,” he told the Hawk Conservancy Trust’s Nature’s a Hoot podcast in February 2024, recalling visits to the bird park there when it was brand new, about 35 years earlier.
His father is a Church of England canon, and faith shaped the home he grew up in. “My dad’s a vicar so we grew up with that,” he told The Arts Desk in October 2017, adding that it left him with “a very firm moral framework.” Speaking to ComingSoon.net in February 2022, he said a religious upbringing taught him that it “doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a good person,” a theme he found again in Vikings: Valhalla.
Oakes went to Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury, where he was head boy. His first job was backstage at Salisbury Playhouse. He then earned a first-class degree in English Literature at the University of Manchester. He later added a master’s degree in Evolutionary and Behavioural Ecology from the University of Exeter, which is why conservation groups describe him as an actor and ecologist.
He trained as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School from 2005 to 2007. “When I was at drama school I was the youngest in my year and was just playing floppy-haired romantic leads,” he told The Arts Desk. He also said he played Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream “four and a half times” before he turned professional.
Career
Oakes started on stage. In 2006, while still a student, he played Claudio in a 90-minute Much Ado About Nothing staged by Bristol Old Vic graduates for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works festival. In 2007 he joined Shakespeare’s Globe, playing Dumaine in Love’s Labour’s Lost and appearing in the world premiere of We the People. He has also read in dozens of the Globe’s Read Not Dead staged readings of rare old plays.
More stage work followed quickly. He played Raleigh in Journey’s End at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, and Mortimer in Mary Stuart at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, both in 2008. In 2009 he appeared at the Almeida in All The Little Things We Crushed. That same year he toured a revival of the Victorian farce Box and Cox with Dog Ate Cake, the theatre company he set up with his longtime collaborator Henry Bell.
Breakthrough as a screen villain
Television came next. After small parts in Bonekickers (2008), Walter’s War (2008) and the student drama Trinity (2009), Oakes broke through in 2010 as the cruel nobleman William Hamleigh in The Pillars of the Earth, the eight-part adaptation of Ken Follett’s novel. The series co-starred Donald Sutherland, Ian McShane and Rufus Sewell.
He then played Juan Borgia, the reckless son of Pope Alexander VI (Jeremy Irons), in the first two seasons of Showtime’s The Borgias (2011 to 2012). In 2013 he was George, Duke of Clarence, in the BBC drama The White Queen. “Maybe I rebelled against what I had already done and was more inclined to delve into the darkness and the depths,” he told The Arts Desk about this run of dark roles, before joking that he has never done “anything anywhere near as bad” as the men he plays.
He also took on smaller TV parts in Ripper Street (2013), the drama Kim Philby: His Most Intimate Betrayal (2014), in which he played the spy Kim Philby, and Endeavour (2015). He appeared in the BBC ghost drama The Living and the Dead with Colin Morgan.
Stage favourites and a West End nomination
In 2013 he swapped villains for a romantic lead, playing Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park. “I’ve been playing bad guys back to back, so Darcy’s a bit of an antidote!” he told WhatsOnStage in June 2013.
His biggest stage hit came in 2014, when he played the playwright Christopher Marlowe in the original West End production of Shakespeare in Love at the Noël Coward Theatre. The role earned him a nomination for Best Supporting Actor in a Play at the 2015 WhatsOnStage Awards. In 2019 he played the title role in Hamlet at Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre in York, and The Stage wrote that he “plays Hamlet with natural ease.”
The stage still comes first for him. “I definitely do a play every two years,” he told Broadway.com in October 2017, calling theatre the main reason he acts.
Victoria and film roles
From 2016 to 2017 Oakes played Prince Ernest, the older brother of Prince Albert, in the ITV drama Victoria. The part reunited him with Rufus Sewell from The Pillars of the Earth and put him alongside Tom Hughes as Albert. Speaking to PBS Masterpiece, he said he always tried to show that Ernest “has a busy and active life elsewhere,” even when it isn’t seen on screen.
On film, he starred in the horror thriller Truth or Die (2012) and learned Polish for the Polish-language comedy 100Dniowk@. He played the lead in Xavier Gens’s Cold Skin (2017), based on Albert Sánchez Piñol’s novel, and played Frederick in the Malaysian drama The Garden of Evening Mists, which premiered in 2019. On radio, he played Richie in all four seasons of the BBC Radio Wales comedy Foiled from 2017 to 2021.
Vikings: Valhalla
Oakes’s best-known recent role is Earl Godwin, the cunning adviser to the English crown, in Netflix’s Vikings: Valhalla. He screen-tested in Dublin in 2019 and played Godwin in all three seasons from 2022 to 2024, alongside a cast that included Sam Corlett, Leo Suter and Frida Gustavsson. The show’s producers had also made The Borgias, so he already knew many of the team.
He was sold on the part as soon as showrunner Jeb Stuart, the writer of Die Hard, laid out Godwin’s long game. “Playing the character’s basically Alan Rickman from Die Hard,” he told Collider in March 2022. “I’m sold.” He also joked with ComingSoon.net about his many costume dramas: “I’m told that if I do one more someone buys me a house, so I’ll keep at it.”
Most of the first season was shot in Ireland during COVID-19 lockdowns. Oakes told Collider that he and his partner, who was pregnant at the time, moved out of Dublin to a closed botanical garden with 14 acres of land, where they spent days off walking their dog. He told The Digital Fix that once the producers learned he was a capable rider, they wrote horseback sequences for Godwin.
The show ended with its third season. “There is not a season 4,” he told the Charles Darwin Foundation’s The Station podcast in February 2026. “That’s the end. Which is a shame because my character was just coming into his own.”
In June 2025 he made his Chichester Festival Theatre debut as Levin in Anna Karenina, adapted and directed by Phillip Breen, opposite Natalie Dormer in the title role. The run lasted from June 7 to June 28, 2025, and WhatsOnStage called his performance “wonderfully still.”
Music
Oakes plays the clarinet and the bass clarinet and sings bass. He is a folk music fan and a supporter of the Bristol folk group Sheelanagig.
Nature Work and Charity
Conservation is Oakes’s second career. In February 2019 he launched Trees A Crowd, a nature podcast of relaxed conversations with artists, scientists and environmentalists, beginning with an episode featuring Mark Frith. He has been a Woodland Trust ambassador since 2019, and wrote in The Sunday Times that November that “trees give us so much.”
He became an ambassador for The Wildlife Trusts in November 2020 and co-hosted its Big Wild Quiz. In February 2026 the charity named him its Vice President. “Our country is one of the most nature depleted on the planet,” he said when the appointment was announced. He is also a Fellow of the Linnean Society.
His work reaches beyond the UK too. He became a Conservation Ambassador for the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation in June 2023, after visiting a rhino project in Namibia, and became a trustee of the Badger Trust in 2024. As a patron of the Manta Trust, he joined its delegation to the CITES CoP20 summit in Uzbekistan in November 2025, where all manta and devil rays won the highest level of trade protection. “I think there’s nothing more important than to keep people talking about the environment,” he told the Hawk Conservancy Trust in 2024.
In January 2026 he spent two weeks on San Cristóbal in the Galápagos on a University of Exeter field trip, taking genetic samples from finches and bottlenose dolphins. Still, he insists acting comes first. “I’m still very much an actor. That’s the day job,” he told The Station, calling conservation “a really well-informed hobby.”
Trees A Crowd is now in its sixth season. The 2026 episodes include a Galápagos run, a May episode on the painted dogs of Hwange recorded in Zimbabwe, and a September 23 episode with Green Party leader Zack Polanski, recorded live at the Wild Summit. In October 2026 he told Pets Magazine he is doing research with Painted Dog Conservation, and said, “Coexistence is not simply possible; it is essential.” On Instagram on October 3, 2026, he shared a “final visit” to the Rothbury Estate in Northumberland, which The Wildlife Trusts and Northumberland Wildlife Trust are raising money to buy.
He also raises money for the British Lung Foundation, with a focus on lung disease in babies and young children. He made the 2013 short film Goblin and gave its profits to the charity. In 2014 he ran the length of the country to raise awareness for the British Lung Foundation and ChILD Lung Foundation UK, and in 2016 he helped launch the BLF’s Children’s Hub for families. Since 2014 he has supported Anno’s Africa, an arts charity working with children in Kenya, and he backs the Shakespeare Schools Festival.
Awards and Nominations
In 2011, Oakes accepted the Jury Prize at the Romy Awards in Vienna alongside his Pillars of the Earth co-stars Donald Sutherland and Natalia Wörner. In 2015 he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Play at the WhatsOnStage Awards for Shakespeare in Love. Mark Gatiss won the category for Coriolanus.
Personal Life
Oakes met Natalie Dormer in 2017, when the two starred together in David Ives’s two-hander Venus in Fur at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, directed by Patrick Marber. He played the director Thomas Novachek and she played the actress Vanda. “I think she’s brilliant,” he told Broadway.com that October. “She’s one of the funniest actresses I’ve ever worked with and of course stunningly beautiful.” They have been a couple since 2018.
Their first daughter was born in January 2021. Dormer shared the news in April 2021 on the podcast That’s After Life, calling the baby a “Covid baby.” In an August 2024 questionnaire for Air Mail, she listed “my two beautiful daughters” under children, which confirmed that the family had grown to four.
The couple registered a civil partnership in February 2023 in a small private ceremony in Bath, Somerset. They confirmed it in a joint statement on March 6, 2023, which Oakes posted on his Instagram Stories and signed “D and N.” The statement followed reports that the pair had married, and it asked for privacy for their family. In 2017 Oakes said his home backed onto a quiet green park in southeast London, and he has since taken his daughter to the Hawk Conservancy Trust he loved as a boy.
Timeline
October 14, 1983: Born Rowan David Oakes in Salisbury, Wiltshire.
2005: Starts training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
2006: Plays Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing for the RSC Complete Works festival.
2007: Graduates and makes his Shakespeare’s Globe debut in Love’s Labour’s Lost.
2008: Plays Raleigh in Journey’s End and appears in Bonekickers and Walter’s War.
2009: Appears in Trinity and tours Box and Cox with his company Dog Ate Cake.
2010: Breaks through as William Hamleigh in The Pillars of the Earth.
2011: Joins The Borgias as Juan Borgia and accepts the Romy Jury Prize in Vienna.
2013: Plays George, Duke of Clarence, in The White Queen and Mr Darcy in Regent’s Park.
2014: Plays Christopher Marlowe in Shakespeare in Love in the West End and runs the length of the country for lung charities.
2015: Nominated at the WhatsOnStage Awards and appears in Endeavour.
2016: Joins ITV’s Victoria as Prince Ernest.
2017: Stars in Cold Skin and in Venus in Fur with Natalie Dormer.
2018: Begins his relationship with Dormer.
February 2019: Launches the Trees A Crowd podcast.
2019: Plays Hamlet in York, becomes a Woodland Trust ambassador and screen-tests for Vikings: Valhalla.
November 2020: Becomes an ambassador for The Wildlife Trusts.
January 2021: His first daughter is born.
February 2022: Vikings: Valhalla premieres on Netflix with Oakes as Earl Godwin.
February 2023: Registers a civil partnership with Dormer in Bath.
June 2023: Becomes a Conservation Ambassador for the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation.
2024: Joins the Badger Trust as a trustee and wraps Vikings: Valhalla after three seasons.
June 2025: Plays Levin in Anna Karenina at Chichester Festival Theatre.
November 2025: Joins the Manta Trust delegation at CITES CoP20.
January 2026: Joins a University of Exeter field trip in the Galápagos.
February 2026: Named Vice President of The Wildlife Trusts.
September 2026: Records a live Trees A Crowd episode with Zack Polanski at the Wild Summit.
Net Worth
David Oakes’s money comes almost entirely from acting. That means TV fees from long-running drama series such as The Borgias, Victoria and three seasons of Vikings: Valhalla, plus film work, steady West End and regional theatre, and radio. He has never published his salary, and none of his fees for these shows has been made public.
He also earns smaller sums from appearances such as fan conventions, but there are no big brand deals behind his income. Much of his non-acting time goes to unpaid charity roles and his podcast. Ownership of a home or business in his name has not been made public, so his wealth comes down to what nearly two decades of steady acting work have earned him.
With Vikings: Valhalla finished, his next big screen role will set the pace for his earnings over the coming years. For a look at the other half of the household, see Natalie Dormer’s net worth.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is David Oakes’s wife?
David Oakes is in a civil partnership with actress Natalie Dormer. They registered it in Bath in February 2023, after meeting on the West End play Venus in Fur in 2017.
Does David Oakes have children?
Yes. He and Natalie Dormer have two daughters. The first was born in January 2021.
How old is David Oakes?
He was born on October 14, 1983, so he turned 43 on October 14, 2026.
Who did David Oakes play in Vikings: Valhalla?
He played Earl Godwin, the scheming adviser to the English crown, across all three seasons from 2022 to 2024.
What is David Oakes’s podcast?
He hosts Trees A Crowd, a nature podcast he launched in February 2019. It features talks with artists, scientists and environmentalists about the natural world.
What is David Oakes’s net worth?
His wealth comes mainly from TV, film and stage acting fees built up since 2007. He has not made his earnings public.
