Chloe Pirrie (born 1987) is a Scottish actress. She is known for her performances in the 2012 film Shell, and more recently in the TV series Under the Banner of Heaven (2022) and Dept. Q (2025). Other credits include the TV series The Game (2014), War & Peace (2016), The Living and the Dead (2016), Brief Encounters (2016), The Crown (2017), The Queen's Gambit (2020), Carnival Row (2020–2023), Hanna (2021), Industry (2024–26) and The Undeclared War (2026) and the films Youth (2015), Blood Cells (2015), Stutterer (2015), and Emma (2020).
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Early life and education
Chloe Pirrie was born in Scotland in 1987 and raised in Stockbridge, Edinburgh. She attended the Mary Erskine School, an independent girls' school in Edinburgh.
She began acting in school and decided to pursue it as a career after being cast in a school production of The Cherry Orchard. Pirrie moved to London at age 18 to attend the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, graduating in 2009.
Career
Pirrie's professional acting career began while she was working as a waitress in a London burger restaurant. She debuted at the Royal National Theatre in a 2010 production of Men Should Weep. Her breakthrough role came in the feature film Shell (2012), a Scottish drama in which Pirrie played the eponymous main character. For this performance she won Most Promising Newcomer at the British Independent Film Awards 2013, and was nominated for Best British Newcomer at the 2012 BFI London Film Festival Awards. In 2013, she played a politician in "The Waldo Moment", an episode of the anthology series Black Mirror. In the same year she was named as one of BAFTA's "Breakthrough Brits",