Chris Geere's trade is the articulate Englishman who says the unforgivable thing and then, for half a second, looks frightened of having said it. In You're the Worst that flicker carried five seasons; he has yet to find another part that asks him for as much.
Fi1m perspective
Jimmy Shive-Overly has published one novel and behaves as though it were several. Chris Geere plays him across the five seasons of You're the Worst (2014–2019) as a man whose contempt has become a habit he can no longer switch off, and the performance lives in the pauses, where the panic shows. He talks fast and over Aya Cash's Gretchen, and when the two of them lie to each other it is funny because we can watch them both deciding to be lied to. That is a hard thing to act, and Geere makes it look like bad manners.
Before Jimmy there was British television: Matt Wilding in Waterloo Road (2006–2012), guest parts in Death in Paradise and EastEnders, and before that the Royal Shakespeare Company, which is where the diction comes from. There was an early Hollywood credit too, as the Hesper Navigator in M. Night Shyamalan's After Earth (2013), a dull film in a part small enough that our own review did not mention him. Then Stephen Falk cast him opposite Cash, and everything he is now known for follows from it. After the series ended he moved to America and has worked steadily in supporting roles, Roger Clifford in Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019), Arvin Fennerman in Modern Family (2018), Philip in This Is Us (2021), and in voice work for animation.
Most actors cast as the acerbic Englishman deliver the cruelty and let the accent do the charm. Geere delivers the cruelty and lets us see what it costs him, so Jimmy is sympathetic without once being nice. He has said as much himself: "Being a heavily insecure person myself, I didn't want people to hate Jimmy because I didn't want people to hate me." It shows. We laughed at Jimmy for most of a season and then found, as the show turned sadder, that we minded a great deal what became of him, which we had not expected and which is down to Geere letting the fear leak into every gap between insults, with Falk's writers giving him the gaps.
The caveat is plain. The reputation rests on one part, and the industry has responded by offering him smaller versions of it: dry, clever, British, in somebody else's story. None of the later roles is large enough for us to judge whether he can do anything else, and we suspect he can, because the vulnerability under Jimmy was never a trick the character performed; it was the actor's. Somebody should write him another lead, or better still, a man with nothing witty to say. Until then, the five seasons are there, and they hold up. Give them past the first episode.
Biography
Chris Geere is an English actor. He trained at the Guildford School of Acting and worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company early in his career. He first appeared on screen in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (2001) and went on to guest roles in British television series including Waterloo Road (2006–2009) as Matt Wilding.
Geere is known for his lead role as Jimmy Shive-Overly in the FX and FXX series You're the Worst (2014–2019). His film credits include Blood and Chocolate (2007), Cleanskin (2012), After Earth (2013) as the Hesper Navigator, and Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019) as Roger Clifford. He has also appeared in Modern Family (2018–2020) as Arvin Fennerman and This Is Us (2021–2022) as Philip.
