Aaron Taylor-Johnson Is Shh Building a Second Career Out of Cliffs, Curses, and Chronographs

At the Venice Film Festival, the English actor talked fragrance campaigns, a reunion with Robert Eggers, and the watch his father wore.

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• A Different Kind of Red Carpet
• The Face of Acqua di Giò
• Reuniting With Robert Eggers for Werwulf
• A Family Watch, Reissued
• An Actor Between Worlds

Aaron Taylor-Johnson didn’t have a film in competition at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, but he still made the trip to the Lido — shaggy-haired, bearded, and noticeably changed from the clean-cut shipbuilder he played in Nosferatu the previous Christmas. He was there as a guest of Giorgio Armani, one of the festival’s longtime supporters through its parent organization, the Venice Biennale. The occasion was the inaugural Giorgio Armani Cinema Club, a new gathering point the house built for actors, editors, and industry figures during the festival, and Taylor-Johnson walked the carpet for the Frankenstein premiere alongside fellow Armani ambassadors.

Doge’s Palace, the Gothic seat of the former Venetian government, hosted Armani Beauty‘s annual dinner that week, drawing a guest list that included Cate Blanchett and Shailene Woodley, both in Venice for films of their own. Taylor-Johnson’s presence had less to do with premiering anything and more to do with a relationship that now stretches back years.

Speaking by phone from the Cipriani hotel in Venice, the actor reflected on the designer’s long history with cinema. “Giorgio Armani has always had one foot in the world of movies,” he said of the designer. (source)

Armani Beauty has served as the official beauty sponsor of the Venice International Film Festival since 2018, a relationship the house also maintains with the Berlin and San Sebastián festivals, and the 2025 edition’s dinner at Doge’s Palace required a notable amount of restoration work to make the centuries-old venue event-ready, according to organizers. Guests dined on a menu built around Mediterranean terrine, burrata ravioli with seafood stew, and seared sea bass, seated at a single long table beneath the palace’s Gothic arches. Weather across the festival that year was reportedly unpredictable and at times torrential, though the Armani dinner itself was spared the worst of it.

For Taylor-Johnson, the trip doubled as something between a work obligation and a homecoming of sorts — the actor has now been photographed on the Lido for Armani in consecutive years, building a visible, recurring presence at the festival even without a film of his own in the lineup. The rugged look wasn’t for Venice at all, as it turned out — it belonged to a role that had already started taking over his year.

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Taylor-Johnson signed on as the global ambassador for Armani Beauty‘s Acqua di Giò in early 2024, fronting a campaign shot by French director Woodkid that saw the actor swan-dive off an Italian cliff and into the Mediterranean. He’d pushed for the stunt himself, training with an Olympic diver in the week before the shoot rather than handing the sequence to a stunt double.

The fragrance, launched in 1996 and consistently ranked among the top-selling men’s scents worldwide, has since been reworked into new eco-friendlier refillable formats and expanded with the release of Acqua di Giò Elixir. Taylor-Johnson has fronted both chapters, tying the campaign’s themes of reinvention to the actor’s own read on the role. “It’s that leap of faith that I really connected with,” he has said of the campaign’s central dive. (source)

The scent’s origins trace back to Giorgio Armani‘s own time on Pantelleria, a small island off Sicily, and a black-and-white photograph of the designer from around 1996 that became a visual reference point for the newer campaigns. For Taylor-Johnson, the partnership has doubled as a kind of public diary entry, mapping onto a stretch of his career — The Fall Guy, Kraven the Hunter, Nosferatu — that has been anything but tranquil for an actor who otherwise keeps a low profile on a farm in Somerset with his wife, director Sam Taylor-Johnson.

By his own admission, the fame that comes with fronting a global campaign doesn’t sit entirely naturally. “I’m learning all the time to embrace all these wonderful moments,” he has said. (source)

The campaign’s soundtrack choice — David Kushner’s “Daylight” — pushed the ad into territory well beyond traditional fragrance marketing, circulating widely on social platforms in a way that outlasted a typical launch cycle. Taylor-Johnson has connected the symbolism directly to his own life at the time, describing the shoot as a kind of parallel to a honeymoon he and Sam Taylor-Johnson had taken to the Aeolian Islands more than a decade earlier — the same volcanic archipelago, off Sicily, that gives Acqua di Giò its geographic origin story. That personal through-line has become something of a throughline in how he talks about the partnership more broadly: less a straightforward endorsement deal, more a role he treats with the same preparation he’d bring to a film, down to training with Olympic-level divers to get the cliff jump right rather than delegating it to a double.

The Elixir extension of the fragrance, released in 2025, kept Taylor-Johnson as its face and introduced a redesigned bottle — a rounded, black-lacquered flacon meant to evoke obsidian — while doubling down on the same land-and-sea visual language as the original campaign.

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The reason for the beard, as it turned out, was Werwulf, a 13th-century gothic horror film from director Robert Eggers that reunites much of the Nosferatu ensemble. Taylor-Johnson takes the title role this time, a cursed farmer whose transformation drives the story, alongside Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, and Ralph Ineson. Eggers co-wrote the script with Icelandic novelist Sjón, his collaborator on The Northman, and the film is being produced and distributed by Focus Features.

Taylor-Johnson described the reunion as a rare privilege in an industry where repeat collaborations of this scale are unusual. “I felt very honored and privileged that he asked me to do something else with him,” he said of working with Eggers again. (source) He pointed to the consistency of Eggers’ crew — the same heads of department, the same cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, who has shot every one of the director’s features — as a mark of the kind of set he was walking back onto.

Principal photography began at Sky Studios Elstree in September 2025 and continued through locations including Bourne Wood in Surrey and the Forest of Dean, wrapping in January 2026. Eggers has called it the darkest script he’s written, describing Taylor-Johnson’s character to Esquire as a man cursed and searching for salvation through love. “He’s a farmer. He’s a man who is cursed,” Eggers has said of the role. (source)

Werwulf is scheduled for release in the United States via Focus Features on December 25, 2026, with Universal Pictures handling the UK release the following week. The project marks the second time Taylor-Johnson has worked with Eggers, following his supporting turn as skeptical shipbuilder Friedrich Harding in Nosferatu, a film that grossed more than $181 million worldwide against a $50 million budget and picked up four Academy Award nominations, including nods for costume design and hair and makeup. Trading that Victorian-era polish for a 13th-century farmer’s world has meant an entirely different physical process this time, with tabloid coverage during filming noting the extent of the makeup and prosthetic effects used to depict the character’s transformation, including scenes shot at Bourne Wood in Surrey that reportedly drew concern from local residents about noise and disruption during the shoot.

Eggers, who also directed The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman, has built a reputation for a tightly consistent creative team across his films, and Werwulf continues that pattern — not just in front of the camera, with Dafoe and Depp both returning, but behind it as well, with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke shooting his fifth consecutive Eggers feature. That continuity is part of what Taylor-Johnson has pointed to as the draw of signing back on for a second collide, describing the director’s recurring cast and crew as a mark of the caliber of people Eggers surrounds himself with project after project.

Omega Speedmaster chronograph featuring a stainless steel bracelet, black tachymeter bezel, and a vintage-inspired blue-black dial with cream accents and three classic chronograph subdials.

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Between the fragrance campaigns and the werewolf transformation, Taylor-Johnson picked up a third ambassadorship in May 2025, joining Omega as a global brand representative. The announcement was made from the watchmaker’s headquarters in Biel, Switzerland, where he toured the manufacturing facilities and heritage museum and was photographed wearing the Speedmaster “First Omega in Space” on a brown leather strap.

For Taylor-Johnson, the appointment carried a personal thread. “My interest in watches first began with my dad,” he said, “if you can believe it.” (source) His father had worn an Omega Seamaster, a watch tradition in the family that reportedly traces back to a relative issued an Omega during service in the RAF in the 1940s.

Omega’s president and CEO, Raynald Aeschlimann, framed the signing around the actor’s range across genres. “His passion for watches is also clear,” Aeschlimann said of the new ambassador. (source) The timing, six years after Omega’s Seamaster Diver 300M 007 Edition and against a backdrop of ongoing speculation about who will next play James Bond — a franchise Omega has partnered with since 1996’s GoldenEye — did not go unnoticed by watch and film press alike, though neither Taylor-Johnson nor Omega has confirmed any connection between the ambassadorship and the role.

The speculation has followed Taylor-Johnson for some time. He was previously photographed wearing a then-unreleased Speedmaster Moonwatch with a lacquered white dial back in March 2024, well before the Omega deal was announced, which only fed further chatter once the ambassadorship became official. Omega’s own marketing team seems aware of the parallel: the Speedmaster First Omega in Space model chosen for Taylor-Johnson’s debut campaign imagery carries its own connection to a 1979 Bond film, Moonraker, even if that link has never been stated outright by the brand. Taylor-Johnson joins a roster of Omega ambassadors that includes Eddie Redmayne and George Clooney, and the pairing arrives at a moment when the Bond franchise itself — now under Amazon’s ownership following Eon Productions’ sale of the rights — has yet to name a successor to Daniel Craig.

Regardless of how the Bond question eventually resolves, the watch itself carries weight for Taylor-Johnson independent of any franchise speculation, rooted in a family history that predates any ambassador deal by decades.

A tailored black suit, open-collar white shirt, and understated luxury watch create a timeless evening look against the elegant architecture of a softly lit historic courtyard.

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Taken together, the Armani, Werwulf, and Omega threads sketch a picture of an actor working two registers at once: the polished, campaign-ready ambassador diving off Mediterranean cliffs and touring Swiss ateliers, and the increasingly transformation-driven performer taking on Eggers’ folk-horror mythology in the Surrey woods. It’s a split that Taylor-Johnson, born in High Wycombe and now based on a farm in Somerset with Sam Taylor-Johnson and their children, seems to navigate by treating each opportunity as its own leap — cliff dive, curse, or chronograph.

It’s also a split that traces back to the earliest stretch of his career. Taylor-Johnson began performing on the West End at age 10, moved through early credits like Shanghai Knights and Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, and broke out playing a young John Lennon in Nowhere Boy — a role that earned him a BAFTA Rising Star nomination in 2011 and introduced him to Sam Taylor-Johnson, the film’s director, whom he later married. From there, the roles diversified further: the vigilante lead in Kick-Ass, Quicksilver in Avengers: Age of Ultron, a chilling supporting turn in Nocturnal Animals, and star billing opposite Brad Pitt in Bullet Train. Kraven the Hunter, released in 2024, put him at the center of a Marvel property for the first time as a leading man rather than a supporting player, while the horror-tinged legacy sequel 28 Years Later kept him working in front of a different kind of camera altogether.

With Werwulf due this Christmas and further films including 28 Years Later follow-ups and Fuze in various stages of release, the Venice stop reads less like a detour and more like a mid-year marker in a run of work that shows no sign of slowing down.