Alex Sharp

Watch him in the pub. 3 Body Problem keeps returning its five Oxford physicists to the same table, and the series is at its weakest there, which we said at the time. Sharp's Will Downing is the one who did not stay in physics and teaches in a school instead, and he spends those scenes listening. He is not doing nothing. He is doing the thing that makes the others look as though they are talking too much.

He came to the screen from the stage, and late. He graduated from Juilliard in 2014 and made his professional debut that autumn as Christopher Boone in the Broadway production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a lead that asked him to carry a whole evening. Film has asked less of him. From 2017 he took supporting parts: To the Bone (2017), How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2017), Rennie Davis in The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020), Peter Wakeling opposite Bill Nighy in Living (2022). Then One Life (2023) and 3 Body Problem (2024).

The pattern in the parts is that he prepares hard for characters who show very little. For To the Bone he lost weight to play a patient on an eating-disorder ward. For Will Downing he talked to death doulas, and we will say no more about why. He has called what they do "a really brave and important job", and the work shows in the performance as an absence of fuss: nothing pleading, nothing performed. In One Life the same quality worked against him. Trevor Chadwick is the man who volunteers to stay in Prague, which ought to be a part, and Sharp is so unshowy that James Hawes's film barely notices him. Our review gave him a clause, and that was about right.

Here is the honest bit. By the last episodes of 3 Body Problem we were moved, more than eight episodes of exposition had earned, and it was Sharp who did it, by playing a man to whom the largest things in the series happen at the smallest scale and who never once asks to be pitied. The Oxford strand had been the series' weak point. His was the storyline that rescued it.

That is a real gift, and it is also the kind that gets its owner cast as the nice one at the end of the table for twenty years. What he has not yet had on screen is what he had on stage on his first night: the whole evening. Someone should give it to him. We would like to see what he does with the talking.