Harry Lawtey

In Industry (2020), Harry Lawtey's Robert Spearing wants to get ahead, and his confidence is never quite enough to hide how much it matters. We rate Lawtey most when he allows that uncertainty to show. As the trainee banker in Mickey Down and Konrad Kay's series, he gives us someone worth following among people preoccupied with getting ahead. His vulnerability makes the ambition more convincing, because failure would plainly hurt. The performance holds our attention even when the programme's sex and excess crowd out the office politics.

That television breakthrough came after guest roles and a feature debut in City of Tiny Lights (2016). His subsequent film work includes Terence Davies's Benediction (2021) and The Pale Blue Eye (2022), alongside Christian Bale. Playing the young Richard Burton in Mr Burton (2025) takes him away from the bankers and lawyers. Those credits give us a broader list of characters, but Robert remains the role on which our recommendation chiefly rests.

Todd Phillips's Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) offers much less encouragement. Lawtey's Harvey Dent is the district attorney, but the courtroom passages leave him delivering one side of a dispute the film cannot make interesting. We were bored by these scenes because editor Jeff Groth holds the two-shots so long that the exchanges lose what little urgency they have. Lawtey cannot rescue them, and there is little here to suggest that giving an actor a position to argue is enough to give him a character worth watching.

Lawtey's useful quality is that he can make an ambitious young man worth caring about without asking us to approve of him. The danger is being asked to repeat that job until we know exactly when the vulnerability will arrive. We would like to see what he does with a part that does not depend on class anxiety or professional ambition. Start with Industry, accepting that its office politics are more reliably interesting than its after-hours excess.