Age: 43
male
Matthew McNulty is a German-born British actor. His credits include See No Evil: The Moors Murders (2006), Looking for Eric (2009), The Musketeers (2016), Cleaning Up (2019), and Domina (2021), and The Rising (2022). McNulty was born on 14 December 1982 in Hanover, Lower Saxony, West Germany, and lived in Berlin and Münster, before moving to Atherton, Greater Manchester, England, when he was 10 years old. He attended Hesketh Fletcher high school, Atherton, then furthered his education at Winstanley College in Wigan. At 15 years of age, he was a lead in a school play, and enjoyed the role enough to make acting a career choice. McNulty was attending drama classes in Manchester when casting director Judi Hayfield approached him to audition for his first feature film. He juggled working in demolition with performing.
In 479 BC, one year after the Battle of Thermopylae, Dilios, a hoplite in the Spartan Army, begins his story by depicting the life of Leonidas I from childhood to kingship via Spartan doctrine. Dilios's story continues and a Persian herald arrives at the gates of Sparta demanding "earth and water" as a token of submission to King Xerxes—the Spartans reply by throwing the envoy and his escort into a deep well. Leonidas then visits the Ephors, proposing a strategy to drive back the numerically superior Persians through the Hot Gates. His plan involves building a wall in order to funnel the Persians into a narrow pass between the rocks and the sea: negating the Persian advantage in numbers, and giving Greeks heavy infantry the advantage over the vast waves of Persian light infantry. The Ephors consult the Oracle, who decrees that Sparta will not go to war during the Carneia. As Leonidas angrily departs, an agent from Xerxes appears, rewarding the Ephors for their covert support.
