A stand-up who became a farceur, Daniel Rigby plays hapless men at full physical commitment and is happiest when something is about to go wrong. Television has mostly given him the joke, as in Landscapers, and he plays it straight; the stage has given him the whole show.
Fi1m perspective
In Landscapers (2021) Daniel Rigby's DCI Tony Collier is a joke about provincial policing, and Rigby knows it and does not wink. He plays a man enjoying being in charge slightly more than the case deserves, and he keeps that enjoyment steady while the series takes the side of the couple he is investigating. We laughed at Collier, and then noticed that the writing had decided he would be laughed at before Rigby got near him. Will Sharpe and Ed Sinclair are so plainly with Susan and Christopher that the police are never allowed to be right for long, and Collier is the man least allowed. It is a small part, done well, in a series that does not need him to be more.
That has been the shape of his television work. He began as a stand-up, playing the Latitude Festival before a first drama role in Lilies (2007). The turn came in 2011, when he played Eric Morecambe in Eric and Ernie and, the same year, Alan Dangle in One Man, Two Guvnors at the National Theatre. From there the pattern set: the odd one in the ensemble on screen, in Flowers (2016) as Donald Flowers and later in Landscapers, and the engine of the evening on stage, most recently as The Maniac in Accidental Death of an Anarchist (2022).
What he does is physical. He has said he has always loved falling over and bashing his head off stuff, and the stage work is built on that: quick changes, collisions, a body that seems to have opinions its owner has not been told about. He is also good at real people; Morecambe was the part that made his name, and it is not an easy man to impersonate without turning into a tribute act. The one reservation anyone raises is that some parts lean on the same comic mannerisms, the flapping and the widened eyes, and it is fair. It is also what he is hired for.
Will Sharpe has directed him three times now and seems to understand him best, giving him rooms full of people stranger than he is, so that his energy reads as one more note in the chord rather than the whole tune. Television otherwise tends to use him for a scene or two and then get back to the plot. We should like to see somebody give him ninety minutes and a camera that stays on him when he falls.
Next he plays Vernon Dursley, a man who cannot bear anything odd. There is something fitting in that being offered to an actor who has spent twenty years being the odd one at the table.
Biography
Daniel Rigby is an English actor and comedian. Born on 6 December 1982 in Cheadle Hulme, Greater Manchester, he attended Cheadle Hulme School and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art after studying performing arts at Stockport College.
He began his career in stand-up comedy before moving into television roles from 2007. Rigby won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actor for portraying Eric Morecambe in the 2011 BBC film Eric and Ernie. He is known for his performance as Jamie Salter in the Black Mirror episode "The Waldo Moment" (2013), as well as roles in Flowers (2016–2018), Landscapers (2021), Sick Note (2017–2018) and Renegade Nell (2024).
