How Band of Brothers kick-started the legendary careers of a brigade of British A-listers including Stephen Graham, Tom Hardy and Damian Lewis

Casting an ensemble of mainly unknown Britons to tell the story of an elite American parachute regiment during the Second World War certainly raised an eyebrow or two when Band Of Brothers began 25 years ago.

Many of the actors had been chosen to take advantage of UK tax breaks - but they not only mastered the US accents, but used the show as a launchpad for stellar careers.

The ten-part HBO series, still available on Sky and Amazon Prime, first aired in the UK on October 5, 2001. 

Chronicling the wartime experiences of so-called Easy Company, the real-life 2nd Battalion of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the US Army's 101st Airborne Division, it won acclaim and countless awards.

Filmed mainly at Hatfield Aerodrome, the £90million production - at the time the most expensive TV series ever - was the creation of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, adopting the gritty realism that had made their film Saving Private Ryan a hit three years earlier.

While the cast included US stars like David Schwimmer - already famous from Friends - it was the British and Irish contingent who shone, as our guide shows...

Stephen Graham 

Stephen Graham played Sergeant Myron 'Mike' Ranney who is demoted for standing up to sadistic commanding officer Captain Herbert Sobel, played by Friends actor David Schwimmer.

He had starred the previous year in Guy Ritchie's gangster flick Snatch, and his career was soon to take off with a role as a violent racist skinhead in the cult film This Is England.

Now 53, he has gone on to star in TV's Line of Duty, Peaky Blinders and Time - while notably co-writing and starring in Adolescence, which told of a 14-year-old arrested for murder and sparked a national debate about toxic masculinity online. The director of that acclaimed drama? Philip Barantini - who played Private Wayne 'Skinny' Sisk in Band Of Brothers.

Simon Pegg

Yet to make his breakthrough in the zombie comedy Shaun Of The Dead, Simon Pegg had a blink-and-you-miss-it role as 1st Sergeant Bill Evans, Sobel's right-hand man - quite a change of direction for a proudly geeky comedian best known at the time for Channel 4's slacker sitcom Spaced.

His subsequent films included Run Fatboy Run, directed by Schwimmer. However, Pegg said he didn't have much to do with the Friends star on the Band Of Brothers set, as Schwimmer was both too famous and intent on staying in character as an anti-social sort 'who kept himself separate from the rest of us grunts'.

Pegg, 56, is now a stalwart of Hollywood blockbusters as Benji in the Mission: Impossible franchise and Scotty in Star Trek.

Tom Hardy   

He's Hollywood's go-to hardman now, but Band Of Brothers was Tom Hardy's first screen role... if you don't count him winning the Find Me A Supermodel contest

on Channel 4's Big Breakfast three years earlier.

His first scene was a memorable one as his character, Private John A Janovec, was caught by his captain in flagrante with a German woman. Despite his relatively small role - he called it 'two episodes and 12 lines', he has spoken of how he worked hard to do justice to a real person.

Also in 2001 he made his movie debut in Black Hawk Down, starting a CV that, at 49, now includes Mad Max, The Dark Knight Rises, Venom, The Revenant and MobLand.

 Jimmy Fallon

Long before becoming a chat show host, US comic Jimmy Fallon had a cameo role as 2nd Lieutenant George C. 

Rice, who drives a Jeep carrying supplies and ammunition to Easy Company. Fallon later admitted he did not know how to drive a manual car at the time, so crew members had to push while he pretended to steer.

Then, as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, he became a talk show host in 2009, interviewing the likes of Taylor Swift, above.

Damian Lewis  

No one was more surprised than Damian Lewis when he got cast in the lead role of Major Dick Winters. At the time, he was 'just another pale Englishman doing lots of auditions' - with the Band of Brothers casting agents apparently seeing 'every actor in London under 30 who still has both his legs'.

Yet Lewis proved impressive enough to be flown to LA, where he auditioned for Hanks, which went so well he hit the town to celebrate... only to be called to a meeting with Spielberg the next morning after 'three hours' sleep, three cold showers and five coffees'.

So began a stellar career that has encompassed Homeland, Billions and playing Henry VIII in Wolf Hall.

But personally he experienced tragedy when his wife, Peaky Blinders star Helen McCrory, died from cancer in 2021, aged 52.

Andrew Scott

For many, he will forever be Fleabag's 'Hot Priest', even though he may next year become the first person to be nominated twice for Best Actor at the Oscars in a century.

In Band of Brothers, Andrew Scott played Private John 'Cowboy' Hall for one episode, but later said he 'didn't love playing a soldier' because of his dislike of weapons.

Nonetheless, the Irish actor went on to star in Sam Mendes's epic 1917, while returning to the D-Day landings at the centre of Band Of Brothers for this year's film Pressure, playing a meteorologist whose work is crucial to the success of Operation Overlord. It is one of the two films for which the 50-year-old has been tipped for an Oscar, with a rule change allowing him to compete against himself. The other is the forthcoming Elsinore, about Shakespearean actor Ian Charleson, who died of Aids.

James McAvoy 

Producers today would kill to have James McAvoy in their cast - but on Band Of Brothers, his character Private James W Miller died in his first episode.

Now a star of the X-Men franchise, the 47-year-old this month said Band of Brothers was not a happy shoot, as a co-star he declined to name 'decided to bully me, on my first day as a professional actor out of acting school. So he got his buddies to just stand and point at me and laugh at me for three minutes.'

If living well is the best revenge, McAvoy can claim victory with hits such as Atonement, Split and His Dark Materials under his belt. But he did miss out on one blockbuster role. Fresh from Band Of Brothers, he auditioned for Pirates Of The Caribbean but lost to Orlando Bloom.

Michael Fassbender  

Band Of Brothers marked the screen debut of Michael Fassbender - who, after acting school did night shifts in a warehouse and frittered his days away playing video games.

However, his role as machine-gunner Burton 'Pat' Christenson in seven episodes of the war drama, did not prove to be the breakout he had hoped... and he spent most of the next two years in LA unemployed, before returning, dejected, to the UK.

But he persisted, and his big break came playing IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands in the 2008 film Hunger.

Roles in the likes of 300, Inglourious Basterds and the X-Men series - playing Magneto alongside James McAvoy - followed. Married to actress Alicia Vikander, he took a hiatus from acting from 2020 to 2023 to indulge his love of motor racing, and now stars in The Agency on TV.