Ian Whyte: The 7-foot-plus actor who has become a favorite to play giants and aliens in Hollywood (and giant aliens)

Imagine having a body that people say could be that of an alien, a giant, or Chewbacca. This has been the story of Ian Whyte's career for the past 17 years. You may not realize it, but you've almost certainly seen him on screen, either as an Alien or a Predator, a White Walker. At 7-foot-1 (about 2.16 meters), Whyte is the guy to play big (and often scary) things in fantasy and sci-fi movies and TV shows. But before he was one of the best creature performers, Whyte was a really big guy. He played professional basketball all over Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s, when a call came out of the blue and changed his life.

“A casting director tracked me down through the basketball team I was playing on at the time,” Whyte recalls. “She said, 'Listen, you could come over and audition, because we're looking for someone exactly like you to play this part.'” The role was that of the Predator in the bizarre, wild and wonderfully ridiculous Alien vs. predator. If you don't remember, it's exactly what it sounds like: the species of alien hunters known as Predators battle against the giant parasitic aliens known as Xenomorphs. Carnage ensues.

Whyte had never acted before, but was about the same height as original Predator actor Kevin Peter Hall and had the same tall, lean, fit physique. It turned out that previous experience was not as important as a proper build and good physical condition. He watched the original Predator movies over the weekend and auditioned.

“It was the hottest day of the year and it was a small studio near King's Cross Station. They gave me a wetsuit and a mockup of the Predator head with thick ropes and said, 'Okay, start running.' And after about 40 minutes, they said I could stop. They asked me, 'How did it go?', and I said, 'Well, I'd be lying if I said it's easy, but I can do it.' That was the audition."

Thus began a nearly twenty-year career playing aliens, monsters, and giants. His role as the Predator led to other opportunities in creature universes, from Harry Potter to Star Wars to Westeros. “I never approach these characters as monsters or beasts. I always approach them as characters in their own way. They are heroes in their own story,” he says.

These days, Whyte has gone from icy zombies to satanic plague monsters: he plays a plague doctor on Netflix's teen adventure series The Irregulars, and he's the devil in the period horror of pests The Reckoning. He went movie by movie with GQ to talk about some of his favorite creatures, learning to speak a language made up for Ridley Scott, and the connections between Game of Thrones and Akira Kurosawa.

Alien vs Predator and Alien vs Predator: Requiem

Ian Whyte: [ Predator ] is one of those timeless classics because everyone is in military uniform. He is in the jungle. There is hardly any reference to the time. It's one of those things that ages very, very well.