Alex Fine has appeared on our screens as a number of thrillseekers: he’s been a survivalist in The Resurrection of Charles Manson. He’s been a cowboy in 1883. He’s been a bounty hunter in American Primeval. Now, Fine—former star trainer, influencer, model and current actor, father, half of a celebrity power couple with Cassie Ventura and all-around gregarious gent—has appeared in Guy Ritchie’s latest London mob opera, MobLand. In the second season, now streaming on Paramount Plus, Fine plays Donnie, a calculating fixer, padding the rain-wet cobblestone which connects the many levels of Britain’s criminal aristocracy. 

Regionally, it is a far cry from those pink desert skies on the western frontier that had previously beset our man of the hour—herding cattle north from the Fort Worth plains and collecting human bounties in 1883 and American Primeval respectively. But spiritually? A masculine severity blows through the winds of these sets and bleeds from the pores of all these characters. 

And Fine, as lovely and humble as he is, would nonetheless seem an appropriate fit. Before he undertook all of those aforementioned roles, Alex Fine was an athlete of the most brutal variety. He was a Division I defensive back, eye-to-eye with soon-to-be NFL stars. He was the kind of guy who left college and became a professional bull rider after a friend, an offensive linemen for the New York Giants, bet him that he couldn’t cut it as a pro athlete in a year’s time. A connoisseur of the adrenaline arts urging the public to live with unabandoned freedom—a broken body merely proof that you didn’t waste it tethered to corporate shackles. But ask Fine and he’ll tell you something a bit different.

“Bull riding was just kind of a challenge to myself,” Fine shares. “I didn’t enjoy it. It wasn’t something that I loved or anything like that… But it was something that I was naturally just decent at. I had no technique at all.”

If there’s one thing that ties together so many of the often disparate professions that Fine has enjoyed, even built upon in order to reach that next plateau, it is that they require an ability to live in, perform, flourish in the present. Not to maintain but to raise your game alongside the stakes. 

“This doctor that wanted to [study the bull riders] ended up putting heart rate monitors on all of us,” Fine says of his first foray into riding. “And my heart rate went down when I sat on the bull, where everyone else spiked…So in my head I was just like, ‘Fuck it, I might as well be totally relaxed.’ It’s almost like if you’re driving a car and the brakes cut out and you’re headed towards a wall. If you tense up, that’s where you might be in trouble, but if you’re completely loose then you have a better chance of not hurting anything.” 

As it pertains to Alex Fine, need for speed can more appropriately be thought of as built for speed. Not a heart that calls out for constant thrills but that understands, instinctively, how to find calm when the sympathetic nervous system is activated and your brain is trying like hell to let you know that the stakes are just too high.   

And for a TV-and-film obsessed kid born in Southwestern Ohio, the stakes could never be higher than they are right now, face-to-face with Tom Hardy and Helen Miren. Fear of broken clavicles and concussions be damned.     

“Me and my brothers and my friends would go to Blockbuster every weekend. I was obsessed with it. But there was no outlet. It was sports only,” Fine says of his Cincinnati upbringing. “The [notable] people before me were all professional athletes. We had no musicians, no producers, no actors. Nothing that was available. So I had no idea how it was even attainable.”

Chalk it up to good timing and maybe a touch from the universe’s guiding hand, but an agent became familiar with Fine’s rodeo accolades and sent him an audition tape for 1883. As Alex Fine often explains it, Taylor Sheridan took a chance on him in what was his first acting audition and the rest is history. But is that all? What was it about that first audition which immediately propelled Fine to the epicenter of streaming success? 

“When they said it, it made sense,” Fine says, reflecting on what that heart rate monitor showed when he first mounted the bull, “but I had never thought about it. And it ended up being true with acting as well. My big break was 1883, and every morning I was asked, ‘Are you nervous?’ My first scene, I’m there with Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, and Taylor Sheridan. And I couldn’t be less nervous. And I really do think it is because the stakes were so high.”

Now Alex Fine is where he always dreamed he would be—no disrespect to the rodeo, the gym, or the runway. He is an actor with multiple credits to his name, parading the streets of London with the industry’s best, learning to drop the southern accent that comes with living on the Kentucky border and still traversing a new world that has you forever at the mercy of another’s taste.     

“I knew that if I did XYZ with the talent I have that I would get better and that it would translate,” Fine says of his professional past. “But with acting, I didn’t know how I could work every day and do something everyday that makes me better.” 

Those days of fractures and lacerations are behind him now, with fatherhood and a dream career taking precedence. For Fine it just means that the rewards are sweeter and the risk of failure more biting. And yes, the work is being put in on the daily. Tap into the recent episodes of MobLand and you’ll see a new Donnie. A sophisticated antagonist who is no longer on the periphery. A more psychologically nuanced, darkly consequential counterpart to Tom Hardy’s Harry. It’s the type of character work that would have most rising actors shaking up and down the English pathways. One look and you’ll know that Fine’s heart never skipped a beat.     

Photographed by Martin Gatti

Styled by Freddy Alonso

Written by Jake Carlisi

Grooming: Matthew Tuozzoli