Ray Stevenson, star of Rome, RRR and Thor, dies at 58

Representatives for actor said he died Sunday

Actor Ray Stevenson has died at the age of 58. AP Photo

Ray Stevenson, who played the villainous British governor in RRR, an Asgardian warrior in the Thor films and a member of the 13th Legion in HBO’s Rome, has died. He was 58.

Representatives for Stevenson said he died Sunday but had no other details to share on Monday.

Stevenson was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, in 1964. After attending the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and years of working in British television, he made his film debut in Paul Greengrass’s 1998 film The Theory of Flight. In 2004, he appeared in Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur as a knight of the round table and several years later played the lead in the pre-Disney Marvel adaptation Punisher: War Zone.

Though Punisher was not the best-reviewed film, he had another taste of Marvel in the first three Thor films, in which he played Volstagg. Other prominent film roles included the Divergent trilogy, G.I. Joe: Retaliation and The Transporter: Refueled.

A looming presence at 1.93m tall, Stevenson, who played his share of soldiers past and present, once said in an interview, “I guess I'm an old warrior at heart.”

On the small screen, he was the roguish Titus Pullo in Rome, a role that really got his career going in the US and got him a SAG card, at the age of 44. The popular series ran from 2005 to 2007.

“That was one of the major years of my life,” Stevenson said in an interview. “It made me sit down in my own skin and say, just do the job. The job’s enough.”

He also played Blackbeard in the Starz series Black Sails, Commander Jack Swinburne in the German television series Das Boot, and Othere in Vikings.

Stevenson also did voice work in Star Wars Rebels and The Clone Wars, as Gar Saxon, and has a role in the upcoming Star Wars live-action series Ahsoka, in which he plays a bad guy, Baylan Skoll. The eight-episode season is expected on Disney+ in August.

In an interview with Backstage in 2020, Stevenson said his acting idols were “the likes of Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman”.

“Never a bad performance, and brave and fearless within that calibre,” Stevenson said. “It was never the young, hot leading man; it was men who I could identify with.”

Stevenson has three sons with Italian anthropologist Elisabetta Caraccia, who he met while working on Rome.