Bell was born in Stockton on Tees, England, where he grew up with his mother and older sister. His father left after his birth. Bell was a pupil at Northfield School, then the Stagecoach Theatre School. He was a member of the National Youth Music Theatre. In 1999, he was chosen from a field of over 2000 boys for the role of Billy Elliot, an 11-year-old boy who dismays his working-class widowed father Read more...

Bell acted as Honorary Jury President of the 2001 Giffoni Film Festival. Since his film debut in Billy Elliot, he has appeared as the crippled servant Smike in an adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, a young soldier in Deathwatch, a teenager on the run in Undertow, a gun-toting pacifist in Dear Wendy, and a disaffected Southern California teenager in The Chumscrubber. In 2007, he played the title character Read more...

In 2005 and 2006, Bell dated actress Evan Rachel Wood, with whom he appeared in the music video for Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends".

He currently resides in New York, and also owns a home in Chelsea, London.