Hugh Sachs is a supporting actor who makes small parts worth watching: Gavin in Benidorm, sniping at Troy over the sun loungers, and Brimsley in Bridgerton, standing a pace behind the queen and seeing everything. The gift is for the aside.
Fi1m perspective
In Benidorm (2007) Hugh Sachs's Gavin is on a sun lounger next to Paul Bazely's Troy, and the two of them snipe at each other across the gap, and those are the hotel's sharpest exchanges because the jokes depend on a word rather than a bodily function. Sachs plays Gavin flamboyant and quick, and it is his timing that makes the lines land.
He had been working on television since the early 1990s, in Minder and Aristocrats, and he has a small part as Ratcliffe in The Libertine (2004), a film we found too dark and too slack for Johnny Depp's Rochester and in which we did not notice him. Benidorm ran five series and 34 episodes, from 2007 to 2012, and gave him a public. Guest parts followed in Foyle's War, Midsomer Murders and Endeavour. Then in 2020 came Brimsley.
Brimsley is the queen's man in Bridgerton, always a pace behind Golda Rosheuvel's Queen Charlotte, and the part is built on looking rather than speaking. In the early seasons he had little to say, and it was only in Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story (2023) that the writers filled in who he was and gave him a private life of his own. What Sachs does in the meantime is watch, and he makes watching readable: a glance at the queen, a glance away, and we know what he thinks of whoever has just come through the door. He went up for the series without much hope, on the grounds that "we don't do romantic fiction; we do Austen or Dickens", and has been in it ever since.
Our honest reaction to Benidorm was that we laughed at the sun loungers and sighed through most of the rest, and that the sniping between Sachs and Bazely became the thing we waited for across scripts that increasingly assumed the cast would carry them. That is the shape of his career too. He is at his best with a partner to play off, Bazely in the sun and Rosheuvel at court, and the limit is that he has rarely been handed the centre of anything. A guest turn as Senator Dhow in Andor (2022) is the sort of thing he does well and briefly, and he has kept up stage work alongside the screen.
An Amadeus miniseries is next. We would like to see someone hand him more than the aside, and we suspect he would know what to do with it.
Biography
Hugh Sachs is an English actor. He was born on 25 February 1964 in Manchester, England.
Sachs is best known for playing Gavin Ramsbottom in the ITV sitcom Benidorm (2007–2012) and Brimsley in the Netflix series Bridgerton (2020–) and its prequel Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story (2023). His other television credits include Rome (2005), Andor (2022) and Midsomer Murders (2007).
His film roles include Ratcliffe in The Libertine (2004), Rev Donaldson in Like Minds (2006) and Tinker in The Nutcracker (2010). He has also appeared in stage productions such as One Man, Two Guvnors (2013) in the West End.
