Mark Bonnar

Watch what Mark Bonnar does when a scene stops asking anything of him. He goes still, the jaw sets, and he looks at whoever is talking as if he has already decided what they are worth. "I do a good cold, hard stare," he once said, and it has kept him in work since 2001. What is less often said is how funny it can be. In Catastrophe (2015) that same look sits across a dinner table on the face of Chris, a husband who has given up and is prepared to say so, and the stare turns a marriage into a punchline without anyone raising their voice.

That is the performance we rate highest. Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney write everyone outside their central couple thinner than the couple, and Chris is the one supporting part drawn with the same care. Bonnar is bleakly funny in every scene he is given. We laughed at him harder than at anyone in the show who was not Horgan or Delaney, and it was the flatness that did it: he says the unforgivable thing in the voice of a man reading a gas bill and lets the others react for him.

The career before that was mostly the stare without the jokes. Bonnar trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, worked in theatre and radio, and made his screen debut in an episode of Rebus in 2001. Then came the long apprenticeship of the British television actor: a regular part in Casualty (2005–2006), guest turns in Doctor Who and Psychoville, and from 2013 Duncan Hunter in Shetland. The turn came with Line of Duty (2014), as DCC Mike Dryden, a part that fixed him in the public mind as a man not to be trusted, and Catastrophe the following year, which proved the same face could carry a comedy. Since then he has been hard to avoid: Unforgotten (2017) as Colin Osborne, Guilt (2019) as a manipulative Edinburgh lawyer, The Rig, Dept. Q, and on the big screen Operation Mincemeat and Napoleon (2023).

The cinema has not yet found much use for him. In Napoleon he plays Junot, and Ridley Scott, rushing everything between the battles, waves him past along with every other officer who is not Phoenix or Kirby. Television, where a supporting actor gets six or eight hours rather than six or eight minutes, suits him better. So does an ensemble: he is at his best when there is a lead to be sceptical of, and he has twice shared a screen with Jamie Sives, a friend from school, which may be why those scenes feel lived in.

He has said himself that he spent his first ten years playing psychotic Scotsmen and is still playing them, only funnier. That is a fair account and also the caveat. The intensity is real and it is always the same intensity, and a writer who wants a Bonnar part knows exactly what they are ordering. We would like to see somebody hand him the lead in a comedy and make him keep the stare in his pocket for an hour.