Daryl McCormack

Matt Claffin, in Bad Sisters (2022), is the younger of two brothers at an insurance firm that cannot afford to pay out on a dead man, and he spends the series falling for one of the dead man's sisters-in-law when he knows perfectly well he should not. McCormack plays him without fuss. He lets Eve Hewson's Becka do the talking and watches her, and the watching is the performance: calm, a little amused, entirely present. He does not take the scene from anyone. He makes the other person in it look better, which is a rarer skill and a less rewarded one.

That is the thing he does, and it took a while for anyone to ask for it. He trained in Dublin, made his debut in the soap Fair City (2015–2016), moved to London in 2017, and put in the years of small parts: A Very English Scandal (2018), Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore on stage the same year, the recurring Isaiah Jesus in Peaky Blinders (2019–2022), a feature role in Pixie (2020). Then Sophie Hyde put him in a hotel room with Emma Thompson for Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022), a two-hander about a sex worker and a widow, and the calm turned out to be what the film needed. We have not reviewed it, so we will not weigh it here, but its shape tells you what he is for.

Since then the parts have got bigger and the rooms have got fuller. Jeb in Twisters (2024) is a face in a storm-chasing crew, and our review of the film found nothing to say about him, which is not the same as finding him wanting; there was nothing on the page. Cy Draven in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) sits in a pew with half a dozen well-known actors waiting to be suspected, and we said at the time that one or two of them could be lifted out without leaving a hole. He was one of the two. Rian Johnson gave perhaps four people a character, and McCormack was not among them.

Bad Sisters is where our reviews and his talent meet. The insurance track is the weaker half of Sharon Horgan's series, and we said so, but we found that whenever it cut back to Matt and Becka we stopped minding, because two actors who know their romance is a bad idea and play it sweetly anyway are good company for ten hours. We liked them more than the plot seemed to, and were sorry each time it remembered the ledger.

He has said he wants to pick roles that scare him a little. The recent ones have not been the frightening kind; they have been the kind where you stand at the edge of the frame and wait for a line. The next thing worth seeing him in will be whatever puts him back in a small room with one other person and a script that trusts him to listen.