Christopher Fairbank

Look at the mugger in the opening minutes of Tim Burton's Batman (1989). He is on screen briefly, he has a handful of lines, and Christopher Fairbank's face does most of the work: heavily lined, pockmarked, the face of a man who has already lost most of the arguments he has been in. Casting directors have been using it that way for decades. He plays the working man, the crank, the one in the corner who turns out to matter, and he plays them so that you believe the character had a morning before the scene started.

The part that made him is Albert Moxey in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1983), the Liverpool plasterer and reformed arsonist among a crew of builders sharing cramped quarters for wages. Fairbank is not from Liverpool; he grew up in Hertfordshire and trained at RADA, graduating in 1974, and he picked up the Scouse accent from living in the city. By his own account he did the accent for the director and the writer and got the job. What he does with it is the interesting part. Timothy Spall's Barry is awkward because he explains too much and Neville is awkward because he is miserable; Moxey is awkward in a third way, a man who would rather not be looked at for long. We were fonder of him than the scripts strictly required, because Fairbank lets Moxey stand a half-step outside the group while the others keep looking his way, and the cast listen to one another closely enough that the looking registers. He returned to the part for the revivals in 2002 and 2004, and worked again with Jimmy Nail on Crocodile Shoes II.

After that came small parts in large films: Murphy in David Fincher's Alien³ (1992), the scientist Mactilburgh in Luc Besson's The Fifth Element (1997), The Broker in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and again in its third instalment (2023). There is voice work in Aardman animations and in games including Demon's Souls, and lately a run in EastEnders (2024–2026). We have not reviewed these and will not weigh them here. What they have in common is that each production needed a face the audience would accept in a single shot, and got one.

The reservation is the obvious one. He is rarely the lead, and a career of this length spent as the third or fourth name on the call sheet leaves us wishing someone had trusted him with a whole film. He appears not to mind. "I prefer the work to speak for me because that is what I do. I'm an actor and I prefer to be judged solely for my performances," he has said, which is the sort of thing actors say and, in his case, seems to be true. Start with Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, and watch what he does when the camera is on somebody else.