Ben Tavassoli

Why organisations work with Ben Tavassoli

• A working screen actor, currently visible in Channel 4’s Screw and previously a lead in BBC One’s New Blood, who chooses to talk in workplace settings about what high-visibility work actually costs him.
• Personal testimony rather than wellness theory, which lands differently with audiences who have heard the corporate wellbeing pitch before and tuned it out.
• Useful for events where the goal is to break the room’s silence on mental health, particularly with male audiences and high-performance cultures where vulnerability is rare.
• A profile audiences recognise from screen, which removes the friction of introducing an unfamiliar voice on a sensitive subject.

Biography highlights

• Lead role as Arrash “Rash” Sayyad in BBC One’s New Blood, the detective drama created and written by Anthony Horowitz.
• Lead role as Mikey Markides in Sky One’s Bulletproof.
• Louis Costa in Channel 4’s prison drama Screw.
• Screen credits across Silent Witness (BBC), No Offence (Channel 4), and Fox’s Tyrant.
• Feature film roles in Warner Brothers’ Overlord, produced by J.J. Abrams, and An Acceptable Loss opposite Jamie Lee Curtis.
• Scouted out of drama school in 2015 by a UK talent agency.

Biography

The entertainment industry runs on visible confidence and private cost. Actors are paid to appear composed in the moments they are most exposed, and the same pattern shows up in any culture that rewards people for looking unaffected by pressure. That is where the conversation Ben Tavassoli leads to in corporate rooms begins.

Tavassoli left drama school in 2015 after a UK talent agency signed him, and worked across UK and US production almost immediately. His credits include Anthony Horowitz’s BBC One detective drama New Blood, where he played trainee investigator Rash Sayyad, the Sky One series Bulletproof, Channel 4’s No Offence and Screw, and BBC’s Silent Witness. On film he appeared in Warner Brothers’ Overlord, produced by J.J. Abrams, and opposite Jamie Lee Curtis in An Acceptable Loss.

Alongside that career he speaks publicly about his own mental health, drawing on the pressures of audition, rejection, and sustained visibility. He frames the conversation around the gap between public performance and private state, and the cost of pretending those two things are the same. The point in a corporate setting is rarely about acting. It is about the cultures that ask people to perform competence whether or not they are coping.

His value in a room is recognisability and candour. Audiences encounter a face they know from television talking honestly about a subject most leaders find difficult to introduce. For events focused on stigma reduction and the substance of wellbeing rather than its branding, he is a credible opening voice.

Key speaking topics

• Mental health in the workplace
• Resilience under pressure
• Personal wellbeing and self-management
• Workplace culture and stigma reduction
• Confidence and self-presentation
• Lessons from a screen acting career

Ideal for

• Internal wellbeing weeks, mental health awareness events, and CHRO-led culture moments
• Male-dominated and high-performance environments where stigma around mental health is the main barrier
• Client-facing or public-facing teams under sustained visibility pressure
• Early-career and graduate audiences in industries with intense performance expectations

Audience outcomes

• A more honest internal vocabulary for discussing mental health at work
• Permission for senior people in the room to name pressure they would normally keep private
• A working example of how someone with public visibility manages the gap between performance and private state
• A reduction in the assumption that wellbeing content has to be clinical or generic to be useful