Daniel Lapaine

Watch him walk into a scene. Daniel Lapaine plays men who arrive already certain of their welcome: the friend who says what nobody else at the table will, the confident stranger whose ease is the first thing you notice and the second thing you start to wonder about. Casting directors have used that face and that manner for thirty years, in Australian, English and American accents, and he has never let them down. He has also rarely been asked to do anything else.

It began with Muriel's Wedding (1994), P.J. Hogan's comedy about loneliness in a Queensland town, where Lapaine played David Van Arkle and became, for a while, a face and not much more. The film's success brought early Hollywood supporting parts, Brokedown Palace (1999) among them, and a reputation as the handsome one that he has said made it hard to be offered anything darker. He moved to London and built the career he actually has: stage work, period drama and a great deal of ensemble television. He has been in Black Mirror twice, in 'The Entire History of You' (2011) and as Dr Pete Dawson in 'Black Museum' (2017), and he was a station chief in Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty (2012).

Most British viewers know him as Dave in Catastrophe (2015–2019), across all four series, and the part shows both sides of the coin. Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney write everyone in their own quick, filthy rhythm, and Lapaine speaks it as well as anyone in the cast. But Dave is the friend who exists to say the unsayable and very little else. We laughed at him often and could not, at the end of an episode, have told you one thing he wanted. That is a writing problem before it is an acting one; Mark Bonnar's Chris, in the same show, was given an interior life and Bonnar ran with it, which tells you what Catastrophe could do for a supporting man when it chose to.

So the record is honest and a little frustrating. Lapaine is the actor you hire when a character must be believed in one scene and not thought about in the next, and there is real skill in that, even if it is not the kind that puts a name above the title. His reputation rests on supporting and recurring work rather than on leads, and the dossier of his career suggests he knows it.

He once said he got into acting "to do different things and not just be that guy." He has done a great many different things. What he has not yet been handed is a part that lets an audience find out what sits under all that confidence. If a director ever gives him one, we would like to see what he does with it.