Connor Swindells

In Sex Education (2019) Adam Groff is the headmaster's son and the school bully, and the easy way to play him is as a threat. Swindells does not. He plays Adam as a large sad boy who hits people because nobody has shown him another way of getting near them, and he lets his size do the menace so that his face is free to do something else. When the script hands him a joke he says it as though surprised anyone let him have one. We said of that series that the boy at its centre was the least interesting person in it; Adam, at the edge, is one of the most.

He came to acting sideways. There was no drama school: a dare got him into a local play, the play got him an agent, and by 2017 he was taking guest parts in Harlots and Jamestown, with a film debut in The Vanishing (2018). Sex Education ran four seasons and made him. Since then the parts have gone up in rank: Robert Martin in Emma. (2020), a lieutenant aboard the submarine in Vigil (2021), David Stirling in Steven Knight's SAS: Rogue Heroes (2022 onwards), and Aaron Dinkins in Barbie (2023), where he was reunited with Ncuti Gatwa and Emma Mackey. It is the usual move, from troubled boy to officer, and he has said he would be happy spending a career flipping between comedy and the other thing.

Vigil is the useful test, because it gives him almost nothing. He, Jonathan Ajayi and Chris Jenks fill out the younger crew, sketched fast, and by the second episode we could tell them apart, which on a boat where everyone dresses alike is harder than it sounds. That is the skill: he is legible in a crowd without raising his voice. He boxed before he acted, and it shows in how he stands, planted and slightly braced, as if expecting to be hit. What moved us in Sex Education, more than we expected from a school comedy, was watching Adam fail across several episodes to say one plain thing to his father, Alistair Petrie's headmaster. Swindells plays the not-saying, and the series had the sense to leave him alone with it.

The worry with promotions is the lines that come with them. Officers get more of them, and lines have never been where he is best. We have not yet reviewed him in a lead, and SAS: Rogue Heroes will be the place to find out whether a script that needs him to talk for an hour leaves room for the boy who did so much while saying so little. We hope somebody keeps casting him in rooms where he is not the most important person. He is good at that.