She played Maia Rindell in three seasons of the CBS All Access legal and political drama The Good Fight and starred as Clare Abshire in HBO's The Time Traveler's Wife.

Leslie was born in Aberdeen, Scotland,[2] and raised at Lickleyhead Castle in Aberdeenshire, her family's 15th-century ancestral seat, where she lived until the age of 10.

[9] Upon their return to the UK, from 2000 to 2005, she was sent to Millfield, a boarding school in Street, Somerset,[10] before spending three years at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

[12] Her leading on screen debut came at age 21 in the television film New Town (2009), for which she won the Scottish BAFTA for Best Acting Performance – New Talent Award.

[15] Based on the Bethlem Royal Hospital, representative of the worst excesses of asylums in the era of lunacy reform, Leslie portrayed May, a beautiful country girl driven mad by lost love.

Club) review for "The Climb" episode, "(In the books) Ygritte is a means to an end... (but) on screen, as embodied by Rose Leslie, she becomes something more,"[24] whilst The Atlantic's Christopher Orr summed up her portrayal in the 2014 episode "The Watchers of the Wall" by concluding: "Rose Leslie has been one of a handful of performers on the show who've really elevated their characters above what they were in the books.

[31] She has since played DS Emma Lane in the BBC detective drama Luther with positive response[32] and starred in the 2015 action adventure/fantasy film The Last Witch Hunter.

She plays Maia Rindell, a young lawyer who just passed the bar exam and whose family is involved in a financial scam, destroying her reputation.

[40] In October 2019 Leslie was cast as Louise Bourget in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel Death on The Nile.

[42] In February 2021, Leslie was cast in HBO's The Time Traveler's Wife TV series based on the novel by Audrey Niffenegger, starring as Clare Abshire alongside Theo James as Henry DeTamble.

"[44] In 2011, Leslie began dating Kit Harington, who played her love interest, Jon Snow, in Game of Thrones.