Will Parry

Will keeps his father's letters and shields his mother, Elaine, from a world she feels is out to get her. Lord Boreal, a man from Lyra's world living in ours under another name, wants the letters and sends a heavy, Thomas, after them. In the struggle at home, Thomas dies, and Will, who was only defending himself, runs. Alone, he finds a window cut into the air.

The window leads to Cittàgazze, where Will meets Lyra. At the Tower of the Angels, he fights for the subtle knife, loses two fingers and is named its new bearer by Giacomo Paradisi, who dies soon after. The knife cuts anything, even the walls between worlds. Will uses it to help Lyra steal the alethiometer back from Boreal's house. Bit by bit, the two see the cost: every side of the coming war wants the knife.

High on a mountain, Will meets the shaman Jopari and only then understands: he is John Parry, his father, stranded for years in Lyra's world. They recognize each other and share a few words. John turns his son around and takes the bullet meant for him. Before he dies, he says the angels will guide him. When Will gets back, Lyra is gone.

With the angels Balthamos and Baruch, Will finds Lyra and gets her out of Mrs. Coulter's hiding place, but the knife breaks. Iorek Byrnison mends it. The two go down into the Land of the Dead, and on the shore Will feels something torn out of him: he has a daemon too. Inside, he sees his father again and cuts the window that frees the dead.

Will and Lyra fall in love in the mulefa's world, and Will meets his daemon, a cat. But the windows leak Dust and must be closed, and no one thrives far from their own world. Mary Malone, who lives among the mulefa, helps them understand what Dust is and why it matters. Will goes home to care for his mother, closes the last passage and breaks the knife. What remains is the promise of the bench in Oxford's Botanic Garden, every Midsummer.

In the books, Will doesn't appear until The Subtle Knife, the second volume, and he lives in Winchester. The series brought him into S1 and moved him to Oxford. He's played by Amir Wilson.