[citation needed] He played Stanley Kowalski in a West End production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, and Hamlet in 2004.

[4] The following year, he depicted British double-agent Kim Philby in the BBC miniseries Cambridge Spies, co-starring with Tom Hollander, Samuel West, and Rupert Penry-Jones.

[5] In February 2008, the Fox Broadcasting Company gave the go-ahead to cast Stephens as the lead in a potential one-hour, primetime US television show, Inseparable, to be produced by Shaun Cassidy.

Billed as a modern Jekyll and Hyde story, the show was to feature a partially paralysed forensic psychologist whose other personality is a charming criminal.

[citation needed] Also in May 2008, Stock-pot Productions announced that Stephens would have the lead role in a feature-length film entitled Fly Me, co-starring Tim McInnerny.

[citation needed] On 5 October 2008, Stephens appeared on stage at the London Palladium as part of a benefit entitled "The Story of James Bond, A Tribute to Ian Fleming".

[citation needed] In early December 2008, Stephens read from Coda, the last book written by friend Simon Gray, for BBC Radio 4.

[citation needed] In mid-2009, Stephens returned to the London stage in the Donmar Warehouse production of Ibsen's A Doll's House alongside Gillian Anderson and Christopher Eccleston.

Stephens starred as a highly self-centred detective opposite Lucy Punch in a three-part comedy television series for BBC Two entitled Vexed.

[citation needed] From 2014 to 2017, Stephens starred as Captain James Flint in the Starz television series Black Sails, a prequel to Treasure Island, set in the early 18th century during the Golden Age of Piracy.

[24] The British playwright Simon Gray (who wrote Japes, a stage play, and Missing Dates, a radio drama, both of which starred Stephens) was reported to be Eli's godfather.

[27] Plowman and Stephens performed together as Sibyl and Elyot in Jonathan Kent's revival of Private Lives – the Noël Coward play in which his mother starred in 1975 on Broadway – for the 2012 Chichester Festival,[28] reprised at the Gielgud Theatre in 2013.