Jon S. Baird

Baird's career started at BBC Television, where he learned the craft before moving into feature films — and that television background shows, honestly, in the way he handles ensemble scenes and keeps performances grounded even when the material gets wild. His feature debut built toward what became his real breakthrough: *Filth* (2013), an adaptation of Irvine Welsh's novel starring James McAvoy as a corrupt Edinburgh detective whose internal collapse the film tracks with uncomfortable intimacy. McAvoy's performance in that film — unhinged, funny, genuinely disturbing — is the kind of thing that doesn't happen without a director who's willing to spend real time in rehearsal, which is exactly how Baird works (The Film Verdict). The pivot to *Stan & Ollie* (2018) showed a different register entirely. Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly playing Laurel and Hardy on a struggling British tour in the 1950s — it's a quieter, more melancholy film, and the scene where the two of them finally air decades of resentment backstage lands harder than most dramatic confrontations in bigger-budget productions. That film earned Baird the BAFTA Scotland Award for Best Director and cemented his standing as someone who can work across tonal registers without losing the thread. Between those two features, he directed HBO's *Vinyl* in 2016, the music-industry drama produced by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger — and that connection to Scorsese became an ongoing mentorship that's shaped Baird's approach to editing and performance (Wikipedia). *Tetris* (2023) for Apple TV+ marked his entry into the streaming prestige space in a big way, with Taron Egerton carrying a film that's part Cold War thriller, part underdog business story. Two major upcoming projects — a Cape Fear series remake for Apple TV+ headlined by Javier Bardem and Amy Adams, and the Lionsgate feature *Everything's Going To Be Great* with Bryan Cranston — suggest Baird is operating at a level where the talent comes to him now.