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 s