Stephen Garrett
Executive Chairman
Stephen Garrett is a British TV and film producer with an eye for pedigree material.
His production company, Character 7, has a track record of making high-end dramas that resonate with the expanding global audience.
His first venture with Character 7, “The Night Manager” was produced in association with The Ink Factory for AMC and the BBC. The limited series garnered rave reviews and audience responses, receiving 12 Emmy® nominations, including Outstanding Limited Series, and winning 2 Emmy® awards for director Susanne Bier and composer Victor Reyes. In addition, the HFPA honored Tom Hiddleston, Olivia Coleman and Hugh Laurie who won Golden Globes® for their performances in the series.
Garrett and Character 7 have followed the success of THE NIGHT MANAGER with two current high-profile series: “The Rook,” a supernatural spy series,in partnership with Lionsgate and Starz, and most recently HBO’s limited series, “The Undoing”. Garrett served as Executive Producer and Showrunner on “The Rook”, alongside Carpool Entertainment’s Lisa Zwerling and Karyn Usher. The show launched on Starz mid-2019. As an Executive Producer on “The Undoing,” which filmed in New York in the Spring of 2019 and is now in post-production in London, the drama reunites Garrett with Bier who is directing the series, written by David E. Kelly and stars Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland. THE UNDOING launches late in 2020.
Other upcoming projects from Character 7 include John le Carré’s classic of the genre, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (again with The Ink Factory) and the television adaptation of Liza Klaussmann’s bestselling psychological thriller, “Tigers in Red Weather.” Peaches, a scabrous US based comedy drama about young women in rehab, by Lauriel Marger, is also in development for Jeffrey Katzenberg’s new venture Quibi.
Prior to Character 7, Garrett served as Founder and Executive Chairman of Kudos, the UK’s leading independent producer of TV drama. With his business partner Jane Featherstone, Kudos’ TV drama arm galvanized British television with such popular and acclaimed series as “Hustle,” “Life on Mars,” and the BAFTA® award-winning “Spooks.” Garrett also led Kudos’ (then Shine’s) stand-alone filmmaking entity. Under this banner he was executive producer for a number of movies including the Simon Beaufoy-penned “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,” David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises” and Bharat Nalluri’s “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.”
Garrett and Featherstone sold Kudos to Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine Group in 2006, and continued to be involved with the company until a few years ago.
Prior to Kudos, Garrett was at Channel 4, where he gave “first breaks” to a wide range of writers and directors, including such now-established talents as “The Full Monty” director Peter Cattaneo and its writer, Oscar-winner Simon Beaufoy. Responsible for more than 100 hours of broadcasting a year, Garrett was involved in everything from the youth drama “Teenage Health Freak,” directed by Cattaneo, to the ground-breaking late-night love-it-or-loathe-it series “The Word.”
Outside of production, Garrett and Character 7 sponsor the Verity Bargate Award for new writing at London’s Soho Theatre and is on the Board of Scenario Two, a theatre company whose production of the musical, “Light In The Piazza,” starring Renee Fleming opened in London and then in LA in 2019. A new work about the life and music of Luciano Pavarotti will premiere in 2021. He has written about film and television for a range of publications including The Financial Times, The Guardian and The Independent. In 2010, he was the News International Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media at Oxford University, giving a series of lectures about the intersection of creativity and commerce, and the future of storytelling.
Garrett studied jurisprudence at Oxford and counts his first break as a 6-year-old extra in a Milky Bar Kid commercial.