West's men are the handsomest at the table and know it, and the performance is in what they do with the knowledge. He is at his best, in The Wire and The Devil's Whore, when someone opposite him refuses to be impressed.
Fi1m perspective
Jimmy McNulty is right about the case and wrong about almost everything else, and Dominic West plays him so that both facts sit in the same face. He is the loudest man in the Baltimore homicide unit of The Wire (2002), a Sheffield-born actor holding a local accent across five seasons, and the programme's great trick is to give him all that force and then decline to arrange itself around him. Lance Reddick's Daniels and Sonja Sohn's Greggs have their own pressures, and McNulty has to argue with them like anyone else. West is better for it. A lesser series would have let him win every scene, and he would have been duller.
The career since has been mostly British and mostly in period. He also directed an episode of The Wire, and has kept a theatre career going alongside the screen work. There is a long run of men in good suits or good armour: Oliver Cromwell in The Devil's Whore (2008), Hector Madden in The Hour (2011), Fred West in Appropriate Adult (2011), Jonathan in Pride (2014), Jean Valjean in Les Misérables (2018), Prince Charles in The Crown (2022). What the parts have in common is the type more than the era: charismatic men with a flaw the script means to find, placed in casts large enough to find it.
Hector Madden is the type at its purest. West plays the presenter of The Hour as a man who knows exactly how he looks in a suit and is beginning to suspect it is all he has, and Abi Morgan's newsroom gives him Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai to be unimpressed by him. What surprised us in The Devil's Whore was how completely he could put the charm away. His Cromwell is plain and heavy and without a flourish, a performance that does nothing to be liked, and when he stands face to face with Peter Capaldi's small, courteous, completely certain Charles I it is the best thing in the series. We had not thought he could be that still.
The Crown asks for the opposite: a particular man rather than a type. The voice and the hands are precise, and the question that hung over the casting, that he is a good deal handsomer than his subject, is one he raised first. "I said, 'You've got the wrong guy, I don't look anything like him,'" he has said of being offered the part. The programme around him is solemn and its scenes often drag, and in Pride he is one of a large cast doing the film's uplifting work between them. Neither is his vehicle; in both he is good company.
Start with The Wire, which we would recommend to people who avoid police dramas, then go to The Devil's Whore for the Cromwell. When the next part is announced, look at who is cast opposite him. West is at his best with a director who casts someone opposite him who does not care how he looks in a suit.
Biography
Dominic Gerard Francis Eagleton West is an English actor, director, producer and musician. He was born on 15 October 1969 in Sheffield, Yorkshire. He studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin and trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, graduating in 1995.
West is best known for his role as Detective Jimmy McNulty in the HBO series The Wire (2002–2008), in which he also directed the episode 'Took' (2008). His other television work includes Noah Solloway in The Affair (2014–2019), Charles, Prince of Wales in The Crown (2022–2023), and the title role in the BBC miniseries Les Misérables (2018). He received a BAFTA Television Award for Best Actor for playing Fred West in Appropriate Adult (2011).
His film credits include Richard III (1995), Chicago (2002), 300 (2007), Johnny English Reborn (2011), John Carter (2012), Money Monster (2016) and Tomb Raider (2018).
