Craig Walsh-Wrightson, a New Zealand-born individual, received his education partly in England. As a summa cum laude student, he turned down a Charterhouse Scholarship to return home, later completing a double Bachelor's degree in History and English Literature from Victoria University of Wellington, while also studying Politics, French, and Economics.
During his post-graduate studies in Modern History, he was recruited by the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation as a documentary-maker and later headhunted by a national advertising agency as a writer/TV producer.
At the age of 24, Craig co-founded January Productions, Australasia's first multi-media creative consultancy and production house, which partnership developed into a top advertising agency, Campaign Advertising Group. Ten years later, Craig and his partners sold to UK interests, and Campaign became Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand, with Craig as the Executive Creative Director.
Craig has written, produced, and occasionally directed over 100 major television commercials. As a composer, lyricist, and music producer, he has created dozens of radio and TV commercial music soundtracks.
He is a multi-AXIS Award winner as a writer, art director, producer, and film director. As an anchorman/interviewer, he fronted the prime time TVNZ series 'Money Go Round'.
Craig is also an award-winning international voice-over artist and narrator, with credits including Cadbury's, Coca Cola, Lexus, L'Oreal, Vodafone, Repsol, CBS Records, EMI, Mitsubishi, McDonald's, Suzuki, and BNZ. Additionally, he has worked on the NZ Book Council's 'Going West' animated cinema commercial, which won a Gold Lion at Cannes, and Television New Zealand's 6 x 90-minute millennium production 'Our People. Our Century', which won the 'Best Documentary' award at the NZFTA Awards.
Craig came late to screen acting as a career but quickly established his reputation as a charismatic performer on series such as 'Xena Warrior Princess', 'Outrageous Fortune', 'Burying Brian', 'The Pretender', and Disney's 'Legend of the Seeker'.
In what was initially a brief guest role in Starz USA's first 'Spartacus' season, Craig's characterisation impressed the showrunners, particularly in his intense scenes with John Hannah's 'Bataiatus' and Lucy Lawless' 'Lucrezia', leading to his character 'Solonius' being written into 8 of the 13 episodes. His character returned to life for all 6 episodes of the top-rating prequel season 'Spartacus Gods of the Arena', which was sold to 150 countries before its Netflix debut.
Craig has also portrayed British general Sir Charles Monro in the mini-series 'Deadline Gallipoli', French Minister of Defence Charles Hernu in the Netflix movie 'Bombshell: The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior', and Emperor Tiberius in season two ('Caligula') of the Netflix Original series 'Roman Empire'.
