Johnny Harris plays frightened men who frighten other people, and he lets us see both things at once. He has been doing it since London to Brighton in 2006, and the type has become his trade and his trap.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Derek in London to Brighton (2006) try to take charge of a room. He is a pimp whose night has gone wrong, and Harris plays him twitchy and aggrieved, a man who has always been the one getting hit and has just realised he is about to be hit much harder. We were frightened of him, and then, which is worse, sorry for him, and it was the grievance that did it: Derek believes he is owed a little luck and has never had any. The threat is real and so is the fear under it, and Harris never tells us which to look at.
He came to acting late, through an adult education drama course at Morley College in Lambeth, and the South London in the voice has never left. There was Gangster No. 1 (2000), then Derek, then Shane Meadows, who cast him as Mick Jenkins in This Is England '86 (2010), an abusive father, and kept casting him; they have made four things together. Bigger productions followed: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), Welcome to the Punch (2013), The Fades, Fortitude. In 2017 he wrote and produced Jawbone, a boxing and addiction drama, and played the lead, Jimmy McCabe, with Ray Winstone beside him and Paul Weller on the music.
The pattern is plain and he knows it. Fortitude and Welcome to the Punch wanted the same damaged man as before, and the complaint that he has been typecast is fair as far as it goes. What it misses is that he chose the type. He has turned down better-paid British gangster projects for work he found more interesting, and he has put it this way: "I don't want to play a badly written nice guy just so that somebody can go: 'Oh he's versatile, he played a wally.'" The men he does play are not nice, and they are rarely badly written, because he looks for the subtext before he signs.
The recent television has moved him up a weight class without changing the fight: Magwitch in Great Expectations (2023), Osip Glebnikov in A Gentleman in Moscow (2024). Magwitch, in particular, is a part the whole career has been pointing at. We would like someone to hand him a quiet, decent man with a good script behind him, and we would not bet on him taking it.
Biography
Johnny Harris is an English actor, screenwriter, producer and director. Born in Lambeth, London, he left school at 13, won the Junior ABA National Boxing Championships at 16, and later trained at Morley College. His breakthrough came with the role of Derek in the 2006 film London to Brighton.
In 2010 he played Mick Jenkins in the series This Is England '86, for which he received BAFTA Television Award and Royal Television Society Award nominations; he reprised the role in the follow-up series This Is England '88 and This Is England '90. In 2017 Harris made his screenwriting debut with the feature Jawbone, which he also starred in and co-produced, earning a BAFTA Film Award nomination for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer, two BIFA nominations and a Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award nomination.
