Jonathan Tudor "Jonny" Owen was born in July 1971 in Merthyr Tydfil, Mid Glamorgan. He has appeared in TV shows including Shameless, Murphy's Law and My Family. In 2007, he won a Welsh BAFTA for the documentary The Aberfan Disaster which he co-produced.
In the 1990s, Jonny was lead singer/songwriter and bass player in the indie band The Pocket Devils. The band was signed to Sanctuary Records in the UK and Pop Music Records in the US.
Following this, in 1999, Jonny landed the part of Richey in the Welsh drama series Nuts and Bolts.
From Nuts and Bolts he landed parts in UK Network series including Murphy's Law with James Nesbitt and Dirty Work with Neil Pearson. His meeting with Irvine Welsh when filming the Gene video "Is it over?" proved pivotal in his career and he has since worked with Welsh (and his writing partner Dean Cavanagh) on several dramas including Dose for the BBC, Wedding Belles for C4 and Good Arrows for ITV (which Jonny also produced).
His 2006 film Little White Lies won several film festival awards and was featured at the Moscow Film Festival.
Jonny has also worked extensively as a writer and producer for ITV Wales, and he won the Gwyn Alf Williams Award at the Welsh BAFTAs for the 40th anniversary documentary of the Aberfan disaster. It was revealed during shooting that his father had been one of the first Welsh miners on the scene in the recovery operation.
In 2009 he appeared as regular character Ady in Channel 4's Shameless and he continued in the role in 2010.
2009 also saw the release of the independent film A Bit of Tom Jones? with Jonny in the lead role.
Jonny is the writer and creator of Svengali, a cult internet series which the Evening Standard and NME called 'the best series on the net'. The series, in which Jonny plays the manager of an up-and-coming band is based on his own experiences in the music industry.
In 2013 Svengali was turned into a feature-length film, directed by John Hardwick, and written by Jonny Owen. Selected to show at the 67th Edinburgh International Film Festival, it was also nominated for the Michael Powell Award, a prize which honours the best British feature film.
Jonny has written for The Guardian, The Telegraph, Metro and The Western Mail. He was also the voice for ITV Wales's Soccer Sunday programme from 2002 to 2008 and did weekly reports from France for ITV during the 2007 Rugby World Cup.
In March 2018, Jonny was appointed as a director at Nottingham Forest F.C. to control the club's media output and video production, having previously directed the 2015 film I Believe In Miracles chronicling Forest's glory years under Brian Clough in the 1970s and 80s.
Jonny directed the film Don’t Take me Home for the BBC in 2017 which chronicled the Welsh football team’s glorious campaign in the Euros of 2016. In 2020 he directed The Three Kings for Amazon with the makers of Senna and Amy and last year the three-part BBC series Together Stronger which recently won the RTS Wales award for best sporting documentary.
In 2021 he formed a production company with his wife Vicky McClure, Build Your Own films, that has already help make a major TV series for ITV, Without Sin and is about to start filming a major series for Paramount Plus. They also sponsor the shirt for his beloved hometown football club, Merthyr Town FC.