Ben Miller plays the uptight Englishman who has read the manual and cannot understand why nobody else has, and he plays him with a sketch comedian's economy. It has made him a dependable supporting face and a lead in shows critics were slower to place than he was.
Fi1m perspective
Ben Miller's men wear the suit correctly. They are detectives, professors, colonels and lords: Englishmen who know the rules and are faintly appalled that the people around them do not, and Miller plays them without winking. He learnt his timing in sketches with Alexander Armstrong from 1997, and when he moved into drama he took the sketch actor's habit of underplaying with him. He is usually the only person on screen taking things seriously.
The career has three phases and they overlap. The sketch years with Armstrong from 1997. Supporting parts in films from 2001, the best known being Bough, the sidekick to Rowan Atkinson in Johnny English (2003), a part he returned to. Then the leads: Primeval (2007–2011), Death in Paradise (2011–2014) and Professor T (2021 onwards), with a recurring turn as Lord Featherington in Bridgerton (2020) between them. He also directs, writes and publishes children's books, which fits a man who abandoned a Cambridge physics doctorate for comedy and has not sat still since.
The shows have not always been received as well as he has. When Death in Paradise began, the early reviews complained it was neither a serious drama nor a consistent comedy. Miller's own account is that this was the point: "People were expecting Silent Witness or Scandi-noir, and it's pretty much... that's what's clever about it, it's pretty much the opposite of all of those things." We think he is right about the show and half right about himself. The tone critics could not place was largely his, a detective played straight inside a comedy played warm, and it looked like a mismatch before it looked like a choice.
The two titles of his we have reviewed tell the other half of the story. In Saxondale (2006) he is Bernard Langley, in a series we liked for Steve Coogan's clever, stranded roadie. In Paddington 2 (2017), which we rated in the band we keep for films we would press on a stranger, he is Colonel Lancaster. In neither review did we stop to mention him. We went back to check, and felt a small, specific embarrassment, because the reason is not that he was bad. It is that he does supporting work of the kind that hands the scene to somebody else, and a review notices who received it, not who gave it.
If you want to see what he does when the scene is his, go to Death in Paradise or Professor T, and give the tone an episode before deciding it is a mistake. If you want to see what he does when it is not, watch Paddington 2 again and this time keep an eye on the colonel.
Biography
Ben Miller is an English actor, comedian and author. He rose to prominence as one half of the comedy duo Armstrong and Miller.
His screen credits include the role of Bough in the Johnny English films (2003 and 2018), James Lester in the series Primeval (2007–2011), DI Richard Poole in the first two series of Death in Paradise (2011–2014), Lord Archibald Featherington in Bridgerton (2020) and Colonel Lancaster in Paddington 2 (2017) and Paddington in Peru (2024). Miller studied at St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
