Paul Ritter is a British stage and screen actor. He is most famous for his roles in films including Quantum of Solace, Son of Rambow, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and The Eagle, as well as Television programmes including Vera, Friday Night Dinner, The Hollow Crown and as Peredur in The Last Kingdom.

Ritter's screen work has included roles in Nowhere Boy, the 2007 television serial Instinct, the comedy drama Pulling, the role of Pistol in Henry IV, Part II in BBC Two's cycle of William Shakespeare's history plays, The Hollow Crown, the late comic actor Eric Sykes in Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This and a lead role in BBC One's 2014 serialised Cold War spy drama, The Game. The Daily Telegraph described Ritter as 'an actor who is surely destined for greatness very soon. His Pistol conveyed perfectly the shock of a man who reluctantly had left behind the rowdy cheer of Eastcheap, and found himself in middle age contemplating the melancholy of a medieval autumn.'

From 2005-2006, Ritter played Otis Gardiner in the original Royal National Theatre production of Helen Edmundson's Coram Boy. He was nominated for a Tony Award in 2009 for his role in The Norman Conquests. In 2012, he appeared in the stage version of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at the National Theatre (as Ed Boone, the father of the main character Christopher) and in 2013 as John Major in the premiere of Peter Morgan's The Audience.