Paul Higgins is known for the loud man, the Scottish press officer who threatens people at the top of his voice. His best screen work is the quiet man being slowly ruined, and Utopia gave him a whole series of it.
Fi1m perspective
A civil servant sits at a kitchen table and lies to his wife about where he has been. He is not good at it. Paul Higgins plays Michael Dugdale in Utopia (2013) as a man being squeezed a little more each episode, blackmailed over a woman called Anya Levchenko into approving a flu vaccine he knows he should not, and he barely raises his voice. That is the surprise. Higgins made his name shouting.
The shouting was Jamie McDonald, the Scottish press officer in Armando Iannucci's The Thick of It (2005–2007) and its film In the Loop (2009). Jamie is all threat and volume, a man who uses his body as much as his mouth to intimidate, and Higgins gives him a physical charge that makes the abuse feel as if it might turn into something worse. It is a fine comic turn. It is also, in the film, one voice in a wall of insults, and In the Loop is so busy with the language that it rarely lets him be anything but the language.
Since then he has been cast, again and again, as authority under strain: Derek Hilton, the scheming senior officer in Line of Duty (2012–2017); parts in Apostle (2018), Greed (2019) and Slow Horses (2022–). On stage he was in Black Watch (2006) for the National Theatre of Scotland, and he writes for the theatre too, including Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us (2008). The type is clear enough that a casting director could fill it in their sleep.
What we value is the other Higgins, the one Utopia found. Dennis Kelly's series is bright yellow and cruel, and Dugdale's scenes are the most ordinary things in it: an office, a kitchen, a man in a suit doing what he is told. Higgins plays the erosion in his shoulders and his pauses, so that by the end of the first six episodes he seems to have shrunk without losing weight. We found it harder to watch than any of the programme's violence, because we have known a Dugdale, and we suspected we could be one.
Outside Utopia he has rarely been asked to carry anything. That is a waste. Give him a man with something to hide and a director who trusts a silence, and he will do the rest.
Biography
Paul Higgins is a Scottish actor and writer. He was born on 3 December 1964 in Wishaw, Lanarkshire, and trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
Higgins is best known for playing the aggressive press officer Jamie McDonald in the BBC series The Thick of It (2005–2012) and its 2009 feature film spin-off In the Loop. His other television credits include Michael Dugdale in Utopia (2013–2014) and ACC Derek Hilton in Line of Duty (2012–2017). Film roles include appearances in Red Road (2006), Victoria & Abdul (2017) and Apostle (2018).
On stage he has appeared in productions including Black Watch. He wrote the play Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us, first performed in 2008. He is married to actress Amelia Bullmore.
