He found out he was going to be in one of the biggest film releases of 2025 while still half-asleep in his bedroom. His agent video called. He thought it was an accident. He let it ring out.
She rang again. The whole agency was on the line. And Gabriel Howell, still not fully dressed, learned he was going to be Snotlout Jorgenson in the live-action How to Train Your Dragon.
That’s a good story. But his full story starts much earlier, and it starts somewhere most people don’t expect.
Quick Bio Facts
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Gabriel Howell |
| Born | February 19, 1999 |
| Birthplace | Hong Kong |
| Raised | Bristol, England, UK |
| Age (2026) | 27 years old |
| Zodiac | Pisces |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), London — BA in Acting, graduated 2021 |
| Sibling | One younger brother |
| Parents | Live in the countryside outside Bristol |
| First Screen Credit | Sunbathing on a Grey Day (2018 short film) — Gus |
| Stage Debut | The Unfriend (2022, Criterion Theatre, London) — praised as “perfect stage debut” |
| Breakout TV Role | Elias Mannix (young), Bodies (Netflix, 2023) |
| BBC Role | Tobi McKnight, Nightsleeper (BBC, 2024) — 5 episodes |
| Stage 2024 | Trevor, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (London) |
| Major Film | Snotlout Jorgenson, How to Train Your Dragon (Universal/DreamWorks, June 13, 2025) |
| Upcoming Film | Jonathan Clarke, Wild Bodies (short, post-production) |
| Upcoming Film 2 | Snotlout Jorgenson, How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2027, filming) |
| HTTYD fan since | Childhood — grew up reading the book series |
| Childhood hobby | Made short films and videos with younger brother |
| Instagram followers | Over 60,000 |
| Net Worth | Estimated $500K–$1M (unverified; various sources) |
| Relationship Status | Not publicly disclosed; keeps personal life private |
| Height | 5 feet 6 inches approximately (per Showbizhut) |
Born in Hong Kong, Made in Bristol
Most articles about Gabriel Howell skip past the Hong Kong detail quickly. They probably shouldn’t.
He was born on February 19, 1999, in Hong Kong, then a British territory in the final years before its handover to China. His family moved to England and he grew up in Bristol, a city in southwest England with a creative culture, strong music heritage, and a community feel that sits somewhere between a big city and a place where everyone still knows each other.
His parents settled in the countryside outside Bristol. That detail from FamousBirthdays is a small window into his background — not a city apartment, but somewhere quieter. He grew up with open space nearby and a younger brother to entertain.
That younger brother turned out to be important.
Short Films Before Anyone Called It Acting
Long before RADA and Netflix and live-action DreamWorks productions, Gabriel and his brother made videos together. They filmed silly things. They made up stories. They pointed cameras at each other and figured out what worked.
It was play, not training. But it turns out those early experiments with storytelling in someone’s back garden were the foundation of something real.
By 2018, Gabriel was already appearing in short films in a more formal capacity. His Wikipedia filmography shows two short film credits from that year alone: Sunbathing on a Grey Day, where he played Gus, and In This Case, You Can, where he played Hunter. In 2020, another short credit followed — Not Feeling Blue, playing Gareth.
None of these made him famous. But they got him on camera repeatedly while he was still learning, and they gave him a foundation of practical experience before he walked into one of the most demanding acting programs in the world.
Choosing RADA and What That Decision Meant
The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London is widely regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious acting schools. Gabriel graduated from RADA in 2021 with a BA in Acting. His training there gave him the technical toolkit that serious classical and contemporary performance demands — voice, body, text analysis, ensemble work, and the ability to inhabit a character under pressure.
His stage debut came the following year. He appeared in The Unfriend at the Criterion Theatre in London’s West End in 2022, a production written by Steven Moffat. A review in the Guardian of that production praised the cast. The critical reception of his debut was strong, with his performance called a “perfect stage debut” by one outlet.
Getting your first professional stage credit at the Criterion Theatre in a Steven Moffat play, right out of drama school, is not a typical starting point. It reflects both talent and timing.
Bodies (2023): The Performance That Changed Everything
The year 2023 brought the role that turned Gabriel Howell from a stage debut to a name people searched.
Bodies is a Netflix mystery thriller that moves across four different time periods, all connected by the discovery of a single murder victim. The central question running through all four timelines is how a body ended up there and who is behind it.
Gabriel played the young Elias Mannix, the version of the character seen in the earliest timeline. Elias is one of the most complex figures in the series — a troubled young man whose origins and choices are central to the entire narrative puzzle. Playing him required stillness, precision, and the ability to suggest depth beneath a surface that the script kept deliberately layered.
The series became a major hit for Netflix, attracting a worldwide audience, sparking widespread critical conversation, and giving Gabriel his first real international breakthrough.
The Short Film That Caught the Attention of the How to Train Your Dragon Producers
One detail that doesn’t get enough attention is the name of Gabriel’s 2021 short film credit. He appeared in a short called Sketching Dragons.
Given that he later landed the role of Snotlout in a dragon film franchise, the coincidence is too specific to ignore. He has grown up as a genuine fan of the How to Train Your Dragon books from childhood — he referred to them as “Hiccup’s Diaries” in one interview, the name by which the original Cressida Cowell series was known in the UK.
The 2021 short came right at the end of his RADA years, appearing to be a project from that period. Whatever connection or meaning it carries personally for Gabriel, the image of someone who loved dragon stories as a child making a film called Sketching Dragons before going on to play a Viking in the biggest dragon franchise in the world is genuinely one of those story details that screenwriters would be told to remove for being too on the nose.
Nightsleeper (2024): A Different Kind of Pressure
After Bodies, Gabriel moved to a very different kind of production. Nightsleeper is a BBC thriller that unfolds in real time aboard a sleeper train that has been remotely hacked and is being used as a weapon.
He played Tobi McKnight, a junior analyst at the National Cyber Security Centre. The series creates tension through its fast-paced, real-time structure, forcing every scene to carry the pressure of an unfolding crisis instead of gradually building suspense over time.
Gabriel appeared in five episodes across the series. He spoke in his November 2024 LEWIS Magazine interview about the specific challenge of filming on a train in the middle of the night and why the “nail-biting real-time drama” format attracted him to the role in the first place.
The BBC production gave him a second strong television performance in consecutive years, reinforcing a pattern of taking demanding material and handling it with precision.
What We Mean When We Talk About Anne Frank (2024)
Between the television work, Gabriel returned to the stage in 2024. He appeared in a London production of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, playing Trevor.
The play is a challenging piece — it uses a dinner party setting to examine how ordinary people reckon with historical atrocity, personal mortality, and what it means to be tested. Taking on a stage role during an active television period is a choice that reflects a specific priority. Gabriel appears to genuinely value live performance, not just as a stepping stone to screen work but as its own thing worth pursuing.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025): The Call That Changed His Morning
Gabriel had a late night before the call came. He’d been out at a concert and wasn’t expecting anything significant the next morning.
When his phone rang, it was his agent. He let it go — nothing about the moment suggested urgency. It rang again almost immediately. This time he answered and found himself looking at a full screen of people, everyone from the agency, gathered to tell him something.
He was still in his bedroom, completely unprepared for the news. And the news was that he had been cast as Snotlout Jorgenson in the live-action How to Train Your Dragon.
How to Train Your Dragon released on June 13, 2025. The cast included Mason Thames as Hiccup, Gerard Butler reprising his role as Stoick, and Nick Frost as Gobber. Gabriel played Snotlout — the competitive, loud, outwardly arrogant Viking whose bravado sits over a much less secure interior.
The film earned a 7.7 rating on IMDb. It was one of Universal and DreamWorks’s major 2025 releases.
In various promotional interviews, Gabriel described Snotlout as someone who compensates for deep insecurity by performing confidence louder than anyone around him. He spoke about finding the vulnerability beneath the surface as the key to making the character work rather than just playing the jokes.
That approach — finding the interior life of an outwardly comic or antagonistic character — is exactly what he brought to the young Elias Mannix in Bodies. The instinct is consistent.
The Sequel Is Already Filming
Before the first film had even released, How to Train Your Dragon 2 was confirmed and filming. Gabriel is attached as Snotlout Jorgenson again, with the sequel expected to arrive in 2027.
That commitment gives him a major franchise anchor for the next several years. It also gives him creative security to continue taking risks in television and theatre alongside the bigger film work.
His IMDb page also lists Wild Bodies, a short film currently in post-production where he plays Jonathan Clarke.
Personal Life: Kept to Himself
Gabriel Howell does not discuss his personal relationships publicly. No confirmed girlfriend or partner appears in any interview or credible source. He has been consistent about keeping that part of his life away from professional coverage.
He has over 60,000 followers on Instagram. The account reflects his professional life without being a window into his private one.
He is the kind of actor who answers questions about characters deeply and questions about his own life briefly. In that respect, he is consistent with the British acting tradition of letting the work speak rather than the personality.
An Honest Note on Conflicting Birthplace Information
One source (biographykind.com) lists Gabriel as born “in London, January 1998.” This conflicts with Wikipedia, which cites his birth as February 19, 1999, in Hong Kong. FamousBirthdays confirms February 19 as his birthday without specifying a year. IMDb lists him as born in 1999.
The Hong Kong birthplace and 1999 date are confirmed by the most credible sources. The “London January 1998” claim is a minority outlier and appears to be an error. This article uses the Wikipedia-confirmed information.
Why People Are Paying Attention
Gabriel Howell has done something that most young actors struggle to do across their entire careers: he’s delivered strong, specific, emotionally precise performances in two different streaming series back to back, stepped into a major international film franchise, and maintained his stage work alongside all of it.
He’s 27 years old.
He graduated from drama school five years ago. He has played a psychologically complex teenager in a Netflix mystery, a cybersecurity analyst in a BBC thriller, and a brash Viking in a DreamWorks blockbuster. He appeared in the West End in his first stage year.
None of those roles sound like the same person, which is exactly the point.
Final Words
Gabriel Howell was born in Hong Kong, grew up filming silly videos with his brother in the Bristol countryside, went to RADA, walked into the West End in his first professional year, broke through globally in a Netflix mystery series, and found out he was playing a Viking because his agent called twice before he was fully awake.
He was a childhood fan of the books that became the franchise he now inhabits. He spent years on screen before anyone outside the industry knew his name. And now, at 27, he’s filming the sequel to a movie that hasn’t been out for a year.
The work he’s done to get here is the thing that matters most. The Hong Kong birth, the Bristol upbringing, the brother with the camera, the RADA degree, the West End debut, the Netflix breakout, the Universal blockbuster — all of it connects into a career that was clearly being built piece by piece from the very beginning.
He’s not an overnight story. He’s a seven-year story. And the story is still going.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Who is Gabriel Howell?
Gabriel Howell is a British actor who was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Bristol, England. He is best known for playing young Elias Mannix in the Netflix series Bodies (2023), Tobi McKnight in the BBC series Nightsleeper (2024), and Snotlout Jorgenson in the live-action How to Train Your Dragon (2025).
2. When was Gabriel Howell born?
Gabriel Howell was born on February 19, 1999, in Hong Kong. He is 27 years old in 2026. One source incorrectly lists him as born in London in January 1998 — that appears to be an error and is not supported by Wikipedia or other credible sources.
3. Where did Gabriel Howell grow up?
He grew up in Bristol, England. His parents live in the countryside outside Bristol. He has a younger brother who he made short films with as a child.
4. Where did Gabriel Howell study acting?
He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London and graduated with a BA in Acting in 2021.
5. What was Gabriel Howell’s first professional stage role?
He appeared in The Unfriend at the Criterion Theatre in London’s West End in 2022, a play written by Steven Moffat. His debut was described as “perfect” by one reviewer.
6. What is Gabriel Howell’s role in Bodies?
He played the young Elias Mannix in the 2023 Netflix mystery thriller miniseries Bodies. Elias is a complex character whose origins are central to the show’s narrative across four time periods. The performance earned Gabriel significant critical and audience recognition.
7. What is Nightsleeper and what did Gabriel play in it?
Nightsleeper is a 2024 BBC thriller set on a real-time hijacked sleeper train. Across five episodes, Gabriel portrayed Tobi McKnight, a junior cyber analyst working for the National Cyber Security Centre.
8. How did Gabriel Howell find out he got the Snotlout role?
He had attended a Hans Zimmer concert at the O2 the night before and was still asleep when his agent video called. He ignored the first call, thinking it was an accident. She rang again immediately and the whole agency was on the line to tell him he had been cast in How to Train Your Dragon.
9. Who does Gabriel Howell play in How to Train Your Dragon?
He plays Snotlout Jorgenson, Hiccup’s competitive rival in the live-action 2025 film. In his own words, Snotlout is someone who performs confidence loudly to cover deep insecurity about living up to his father’s expectations.
10. Was Gabriel Howell already a fan of How to Train Your Dragon before landing the role?
Yes. He grew up reading the original Cressida Cowell book series, which is known in the UK as “Hiccup’s Diaries.” It was a significant part of his childhood.
11. What other films has Gabriel Howell appeared in?
His film credits include short films Sunbathing on a Grey Day (2018), In This Case, You Can (2018), Not Feeling Blue (2020), Sketching Dragons (2021), and The Fence (2022, where he played Dennis). He also appeared in Bluewaspman (2025).
12. Will Gabriel Howell return for How to Train Your Dragon 2?
Yes. He is confirmed to reprise the role of Snotlout Jorgenson in How to Train Your Dragon 2, which is currently filming as of 2026 and expected to release in 2027.
13. Does Gabriel Howell have social media?
He has an Instagram account with over 60,000 followers. He uses it to share professional content and occasional personal moments but keeps his private life largely off social media.
14. Is Gabriel Howell in a relationship?
He has not publicly confirmed any relationship. He consistently keeps his personal life away from interview coverage and social media.
15. What is Gabriel Howell’s estimated net worth?
Various sources estimate his net worth at between $500,000 and $1 million based on his television and film work. No official figure has been confirmed. Given his major franchise role and multiple streaming credits, the estimate will likely be revised upward as his career continues.
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