His Television work includes three BBC period dramas: The Moonstone with Keeley Hawes, Madame Bovary with Frances O'Connor and as Lord Charles Maulver in the 2007 five-part series Cranford. In 1999 he starred as Marshall in ITV's seven-part drama Wonderful You alongside his future mother-in-law Phyllida Law and future brother-in-law Richard Lumsden. Recently he filmed a number of readings of love scenes from a selection of classic and modern love scenes, from Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles to Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss for The Carte Noire Readers.

He has been married to Emma Thompson, who played Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, since 2003. They have a daughter, Gaia Romilly (born in 1999) and a Rwandan boy named Tindyebwa Agaba (informally adopted in 2003 at the age of 16).