Paul Anderson

Arthur Shelby's hands shake. They shake before the violence rather than after it, and Paul Anderson lets us watch them, so that by the time he moves we have been dreading it for most of a scene. That is the whole performance in small: a man who came back from the tunnels worse than he went in, who knows it, and who can do nothing about it except hit somebody. Cillian Murphy's Tommy decides to be frightening. Arthur simply is, and is frightened of it.

Anderson started on stage in the mid-2000s in plays by Gregory Burke, took his first film lead as Bex in The Firm (2009) and turned up as Colonel Sebastian Moran in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). Then Steven Knight cast him in Peaky Blinders in 2013 and he stayed for six series, until 2022. In the middle of that run came a crowded 2015: Legend, In the Heart of the Sea and The Revenant, all in support. He has worked steadily in films and television since, mostly a few names down the cast list.

The Shelby years are where a reader should start, and where he is at his best. He has said of Arthur that he was "going to play it with a little bit of vulnerability, some emotional conscience", and for the first two series that is exactly what is on the screen. In those early series we were more afraid of Arthur than of anyone else in the programme, because Anderson never lets you see the violence arrive as a decision. It comes from somewhere lower down, and he looks as surprised by it as the man on the floor.

The complaint against him, and it has been made often, is that he goes too far. He does. As the programme grew grander and slower, so did Arthur, and there are scenes in the later series where the twitch and the growl have become a turn rather than a character. Our view is that the show got there first and he followed it: the writing fell in love with its own walk, and Arthur was the most conspicuous walker. It is still the performance most people will remember him for, and they are right to.

In films he has been a useful heavy, three times alongside Tom Hardy, including as Albert Donoghue in Legend (2015). The Revenant (2015) is the odd one out: he is in it, as a man called Anderson, and our review of Iñárritu's film found no cause to mention him, which tells you the size of the part rather than anything about the work. What he has not yet had is a film that hands him the middle of the picture and asks him to hold it the way Arthur did for nine years. Someone should try it, and see what he does when nobody has given him anyone to hit.