Kris Hitchen's strength is making a hard-pressed character someone worth spending time with. His humour in Sorry We Missed You gives us reasons to care before the trouble mounts, and remains our strongest reason to seek him out.
Fi1m perspective
In the customer encounters in Sorry We Missed You (2019), Kris Hitchen gives Ricky room to be funny. The job brings its difficulties, but he lets us meet the man doing it. We warmed to him in these exchanges, because his humour made the family scenes feel as though they concerned someone we knew. It is an approachable performance, and the film needs it.
The lead in Ken Loach's film was his breakthrough; much of the work since has kept him among working people and everyday professionals. Trigger Point (2022) and The Long Shadow (2023), in which he plays DC John Nunn, take him into television thrillers and procedural drama. Speak No Evil (2024), directed by James Watkins, gives him a smaller part as Mike in a horror remake. These are different settings, though we would still send someone to Ricky first.
Hitchen has described Loach's hands-off approach as a way of building confidence until the actor becomes less conscious of the cameras. The performance in Sorry We Missed You is relaxed enough to accommodate humour without softening the frustration. There is a limit to what that can repair: the accumulated setbacks sometimes feel too carefully arranged. We recommend the film with that reservation, though it is the writing that strains our patience rather than Hitchen. He has already made the family worth following by then.
The comedy Hitchen brings to Mike suggests a useful way forward in smaller roles. Rather than settling for a standard moody horror figure, he finds room for a little personality. Speak No Evil is strongest in its uncomfortable social encounters; when the violence takes over, it becomes more ordinary and less frightening. That limits our enthusiasm for the film, however welcome his contribution. Start with Sorry We Missed You, where he has time to let us enjoy Ricky's company before we worry about him.
Biography
Kris Hitchen is an English actor. Born in Salford on 28 April 1974, he trained in ballet and musical theatre as a child and appeared in local stage productions. After an early attempt to enter acting, he worked as a plumber for over twenty years before returning to the profession around the age of 41.
Hitchen gained recognition for his lead performance as Ricky Turner in Ken Loach's Sorry We Missed You (2019), for which he received a nomination for Best Actor at the British Independent Film Awards. Subsequent credits include roles in the television series The North Water (2021), Anne Boleyn (2021), Trigger Point (2022) and The Long Shadow (2023), and the films The War Below (2021), Four Lives (2022) and Speak No Evil (2024).
