Dean Andrews plays the man standing a pace behind the hero: Northern, plain-spoken, not asking to be liked. As Ray Carling across Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes he made a bigot worth watching, and he has been steadily useful in other people's ensembles ever since.
Fi1m perspective
Ray Carling is the one who does not get the speech. In Life on Mars (2006) and Ashes to Ashes (2008) Gene Hunt kicks the door, insults everyone and takes the last word, and Dean Andrews stands just behind him as the detective sergeant who agrees with all of it and says less. Ray is a pig. He was a pig in 1973 and he is still one in 1981 London, and Andrews never asks us to forgive him for it. What he does instead is let something show underneath, a bruise the scripts do not bother to name, and by the second series we found ourselves watching him when we should have been watching the plot, because he was the only one in the corner of the frame doing anything the writers had not told him to do.
He came to it late and sideways. For more than twenty years he was a singer, in working men's clubs, holiday camps and on cruise ships, and it was Ken Loach who first put him on a screen, in The Navigators (2001), casting him from among non-professional performers when he was about 38 and had no training at all. "It took me 10 years to say I was an actor," he has said. "I used to say I'm a singer, but I do a bit of acting as well." Ray Carling arrived five years after Loach and made him.
It also fixed him. Ashes to Ashes leaned on Philip Glenister for a series and a half and fed Hunt everything, and Andrews, Marshall Lancaster's Chris and Montserrat Lombard's Shaz were left to be better than what they were given, which they were. That is his trade: the ensemble man who does not need the material to be good in order to be good himself. Since then the parts have been of a piece. Bert Whalley in United (2011), Robbie in Last Tango in Halifax (2012 to 2016), five years as Will Taylor in Emmerdale (2019 to 2024). We have not reviewed those and will not judge them here. What we can say is that they are all straightforward working-class Northern men, in uniform or out of it, and that for a while after Ray he was asked to play very little else.
The limit is the flip side of the virtue. Nobody hires Andrews to transform; they hire him to be the fixed point in the frame while somebody flashier does the transforming, and he gives them exactly that, week after week, for years. Loach saw something in a club singer at 38 that two decades of bookers had not. It would be worth somebody looking again, this time for a part where he is the one who gets to speak.
Biography
Dean Andrews (born 6 August 1963) is an English actor from Rotherham, Yorkshire. He is known for playing DS Ray Carling in the BBC series Life on Mars (2006–2007) and its sequel Ashes to Ashes (2008–2010).
He began his acting career after working as a singer on cruise ships for twenty years. Film director Ken Loach cast him in The Navigators (2001). Subsequent roles include Buried (2003), which won the BAFTA Award for Best Drama Series, My Summer of Love (2005), United (2011), Last Tango in Halifax (2012–2016) and Emmerdale (2019–2024) as Will Taylor.
