Lorne Balfe

Lorne Balfe is a Grammy Award-winning composer and producer known for his various film, television, and video game scores. A protégé of composer Hans Zimmer, he has garnered acclaim for scoring such high-profile films as 2018's Mission Impossible: Fallout, 2022's Black Adam, and 2024's Bad Boys: Ride or Die.

Born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1976, Balfe grew up in a musical family and began playing piano at a young age. A gifted musician, by his teens he was making a living writing jingles for commercials, a skill he quickly transmuted into scoring music for TV shows. After a period living in London, he relocated to California, where he joined the staff at composer Hans Zimmer's Santa Monica-based Remote Control Productions. Working with Zimmer, he earned credits for such notable productions as Batman Begins, The Da Vinci Code, Transformers, and more.

In 2009, he joined Zimmer and composer James Newton Howard in taking home the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media for their work on director Christopher Nolan's Batman sequel The Dark Knight. However, it was Balfe's collaboration with Zimmer on the music for the 2010 animated film Megamind that helped launch his solo composing career. At the same time, he earned acclaim for his work in video games, composing the music for Crysis 2, Skylanders, Assassin's Creed: Revelations with Jesper Kyd, and Assassin's Creed III. Both of his Assassin's Creed scores earned BAFTA nominations for Best Original Music.

Although he continued to work with Zimmer, Balfe became an in-demand composer in his own right, and supplied the scores for such high-profile productions as 2013's biopic Salinger, 2014's animated Penguins of Madagascar, and 2015's Terminator Genysis. In 2017, he composed the music for The Lego Batman Movie. He was also score producer on the war drama Dunkirk that year, and earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Main Title Theme for his collaboration with Zimmer on the National Geographic Channel's Albert Einstein series Genius. In 2018, he scored Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible: Fallout and returned the following year with a handful of projects, including joining the series His Dark Materials as main composer, and supplying the music for the Will Smith sci-fi thriller Gemini Man and the Michael Bay action movie 6 Underground. Balfe then paired with Zimmer again for 2020's Rebuilding Paradise, director Ron Howard's documentary about the 2018 California wildfires. He also scored the 2020 Will Smith and Martin Lawrence action comedy Bad Boys for Life.

Highlights of over a dozen projects he released over the next two years included 2021's Outside the Wire, Marvel entry Black Widow, and 2022's Top Gun: Maverick, whose soundtrack combined the talents of Balfe, Zimmer, Harold Faltermeyer, and Lady Gaga. That year, he also composed the score for the DC Comics blockbuster Black Adam, whose pulsing tension he contrasted with the softer, more lyrical approach of his music for the Julia Roberts-George Clooney romantic comedy Ticket to Paradise. Over the next two years, Balfe continued to take on big-budget scores including 2023's Gran Turismo and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One and 2024's Bad Boys: Ride or Die and Beverly Hills Cop: Alex F, the latter of which incorporated parts of the franchise's original music by previous collaborator Harold Faltermeyer. ~ Matt Collar, Rovi