Mark Thrippleton (born 13 July 1967) is an English actor from Leeds. Thrippleton worked as a roofer and tiler before taking up acting in the 1980s. In 1984 he appeared in How We Used to Live — a British educational drama tracing the lives and fortunes of fictional Yorkshire families from Ewardian times. He also played a young Joseph Stalin in the film Testimony (1988), which told the story of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Thrippleton has since been seen in the successful ITV soap opera, Coronation Street, playing the minor role of Simon Hanson in 1997.