Joe Thomas plays young men who have decided how they will come across and whose faces have not been told. It is a narrow gift, and casting has rarely asked him to leave it, but within it he is exact, patient and generous.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Joe Thomas at the start of Fresh Meat (2011). Kingsley Owen walks into the student house having decided to be cool this time, and his face has not been told. That is the whole act, and it is a good one. Thomas plays young men who have a plan for how they will come across and a body that files a different report, and the comedy sits in the gap between the two. He does not push the gap. He lets us find it.
He came up through the Cambridge Footlights, which may explain the ensemble instinct, because he has almost never been the loudest person in a scene and has never seemed to want to be. Simon Cooper in The Inbetweeners (2008–2010) was the breakthrough, and the four leads, Thomas with Simon Bird, James Buckley and Blake Harrison, made the friendship convincing without asking us to approve of much that was said within it. None of them needed to win an exchange. Buckley's Jay brags, Thomas's Simon responds, and the response is often the funnier half. Two films followed, in 2011 and 2014, and then Fresh Meat took him to university for four series, opposite Jack Whitehall's JP and Zawe Ashton's Nordstrom, both of whom get the bigger lines. Thomas holds the middle of the frame while they take it.
Since then he has written as well as acted, co-creating Chickens (2013) with Bird and Jonny Sweet, and White Gold (2017–2019) put him back beside Buckley in 1980s Essex, the county he was born in. The Festival (2018), directed by Iain Morris, co-creator of The Inbetweeners, gave him a film lead; The Crown Jewels (2023) put him on stage. None of it has taken him far from the awkward, decent young man, and he has said as much. "I would love to do a villain because I think villains are so interesting," he told an interviewer in 2017. Casting has not yet obliged.
We should admit that we laughed at Simon Cooper harder than at anyone else in that quartet, and felt a little ashamed of it, because Thomas never plays Simon as a fool. He plays him as a boy who means it every time, and the effort is what hurts and what is funny. That combination, the vulnerability arriving half a second after the joke, is what Fresh Meat used well and The Inbetweeners used best.
Is he wasted? Not yet. The ensembles have suited him because his gift is reactive, and a reactive actor needs a room. But the nice-guy label has stuck, and we would like to see a director test what that face does when it has something to hide. Our guess is that it cannot, which would make either a fine joke or a fine part.
Biography
Joe Thomas is an English actor and comedian. He is best known for playing Simon Cooper in the E4 sitcom The Inbetweeners (2008–2010) and its film adaptations The Inbetweeners Movie (2011) and The Inbetweeners 2 (2014).
Thomas was born on 28 October 1983 in Chelmsford, Essex. He attended King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford, and read History at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the Footlights alongside future co-star Simon Bird. After graduating in 2006, he appeared in Fresh Meat (2011–2016) as Kingsley Owen and in White Gold (2017–2019) as Martin Lavender.
