In the Sherlock Holmes film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Jared Harris played Professor Moriarty.
The 2011 film was directed by Guy Ritchie and stars Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law as Dr John Watson. Harris’s Moriarty is Holmes’s intellectual and strategic opponent, adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty but developed for the film’s large-scale international plot.
The story follows Holmes and Watson as they investigate a chain of political assassinations and bombings. Moriarty seeks to profit from a European conflict while manipulating governments, arms dealers, and nationalist tensions. The film places their final confrontation at the Reichenbach Falls, echoing “The Final Problem.”
Mark Strong played Lord Henry Blackwood in the first 2009 Sherlock Holmes film, which is a frequent casting mix-up. Harris’s performance belongs specifically to the sequel, not the earlier movie.