Jack Whitehall

JP expects his money to make him popular with the other students. In Fresh Meat (2011), Jack Whitehall makes that expectation both irritating and rather sad: the boy has no idea what to try when confidence fails him. We felt sorry for him, because Whitehall allows us to see the uncertainty beneath behaviour that ought to drive everyone away. He does not ask us to find JP agreeable. He gives us enough to understand why he is so hard to live with.

Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong’s student-house comedy gives him the right company, too. Beside Greg McHugh’s still, self-contained Howard, JP’s need to impress becomes harder to miss. The writing keeps asking who these people are pretending to be, which gives Whitehall something more demanding than a succession of snobbish remarks. There are limits to our enthusiasm for the programme: forty-minute episodes stretch the material, and the last series thins.

Alongside JP, he played Alfie Wickers in Bad Education (2012), which he co-created and co-wrote. Alfie also reached the cinema in The Bad Education Movie (2015). Decline and Fall (2017) gave him a more dramatic lead as Paul Pennyfeather in an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh. Those parts suggest ambitions beyond repeating JP, though the frequent casting as awkward, privileged Englishmen does risk wearing out a useful comic speciality.

His Hollywood supporting work is less persuasive evidence of what he can do. McGregor Houghton in Jungle Cruise (2021) gives him another out-of-place figure to play. The adventure is serviceable, with too much plot and too little convincing danger, although Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson make the bickering enjoyable. It does not make the case for Whitehall that JP does. For that, try the first two series of Fresh Meat.