Alex Macqueen plays the official who is sure he is the most important man at the table and is then proved wrong. Dry, exact and quietly odd, he is at his best in Armando Iannucci's satire and Julia Davis's darker comedy, and almost never the lead.
Fi1m perspective
Alex Macqueen's men speak as if they have already won the argument. The sentences are tidy, the delivery is careful, and the pleasure is in watching events decline to agree with them. He plays advisers, civil servants, emissaries and fathers who believe in their own authority, and the comedy comes from how little anyone around them shares the belief. He trained and briefly practised as a barrister before acting full-time, and the habit of sounding certain while being wrong has stayed with him.
The career has two spines. The first is Armando Iannucci: Julius Nicholson, the self-important blue-skies adviser in The Thick of It (2005), and Sir Jonathan Tutt in In the Loop (2009), where the same world is given a war to mishandle. The second is Julia Davis, who cast him as the lead in Hunderby (2012) and again in Sally4Ever (2018), and who gets something nastier and stranger out of him than anyone else has. Around these sit the parts most people know him from: five years as the sarcastic anaesthetist Keith Greene in Holby City, Neil's dad in The Inbetweeners (2008), and a steady run of supporting roles in films, including Youth and Slow West, both in 2015.
Our own reviews are no help in singling him out, and that is partly the job description. We scored In the Loop 92 and did not mention Tutt; we liked Slow West and found Youth too fond of its own speeches, and did not mention Rupert Cavendish or the Queen's Emissary either. What we remember of In the Loop is how angry we were by the end, and not at Peter Capaldi's shouting, which is the enjoyable part, but at the quieter men in good suits whose wounded pride the shouting is about. Macqueen is one of those men. He is built to be the person you are furious with afterwards rather than during.
The reservation, such as it is, is that he is cast the same way too often, as the eccentric or the authority figure in the corner. The exception is The Hide (2009), a low-budget two-hander written by Tim Whitnall, in which he played Roy Tunt, a pedant whose obsessiveness is funny and then is not, and which showed he can carry a film on his own. He knows the pattern himself. "I love eccentricity and villainy, they're the two things I take great pleasure in performing as opposed to what I slightly churlishly call 'information in costume'." The more recent work in Becoming Elizabeth (2022) and Hijack (2023) suggests the costumes are getting better even when the information is not.
If you want to see what he can do, start with The Thick of It and Hunderby, then find The Hide. Someone should give him another lead before the pedant becomes the only thing he is asked for.
Biography
Alex Macqueen is an English actor. Born on 30 November 1973 in Epsom, Surrey, he was educated at St John's School, Leatherhead, and read English at Collingwood College, Durham University, before taking an MPhil at Pembroke College, Cambridge.
He began acting after time with the National Youth Theatre and early work in business affairs and politics. Macqueen is known for recurring television roles including Keith Greene in Holby City (2005–2010), Julius Nicholson in The Thick of It (2005–2012), and Kevin Sutherland in The Inbetweeners (2008–2010). He played Sir Jonathan Tutt in the film In the Loop (2009), directed by Armando Iannucci, and has appeared in Four Lions (2010), The Inbetweeners Movie (2011), Youth (2015), and Cinderella (2015).
