Paul Kaye

The image that sticks is a man with red hair and a suit too loud for the occasion, holding a microphone under some celebrity's chin and asking the question nobody else would. Dennis Pennis ran on The Sunday Show from 1995 to 1997, and the joke was that the famous had to stand there and take it. Kaye has since described the man underneath as "a very insecure, mousy-haired, middle-aged man with a deep fear of authority", which is the best account of the character we have read. The fear is what made it work. He looked as if he might be hit at any moment, and kept asking.

He came to acting sideways. A theatre design degree from Trent Polytechnic in 1987 led to graphic design, illustration and punk bands before it led to television, and there is something of the designer in how he builds a part from the outside: the hair first, then the clothes. From the early 2000s he took comedy leads and supporting parts in drama, including the lead, Frankie Wilde, in the mockumentary It's All Gone Pete Tong (2005). Then came the stretch that fixed his reputation: Mr Wormwood on stage in Matilda the Musical from 2010 to 2012, Thoros of Myr across three seasons of Game of Thrones from 2013 to 2017, Jim Winshaw in Three Girls (2017), and a recurring part in Vera from 2019 to 2023.

What he does, put simply, is intensity at the side of a scene. Casting directors reach for him when a part needs to be eccentric, comic or slightly alarming, and he obliges. The risk is plain: a man who is good at being odd gets asked to be odd for a living. Voice work, Vince the fox in Mongrels and Cosmos in The House (2022), suits him for the same reason, since the voice alone carries the strangeness. We will admit that Pennis still makes us laugh and then feel slightly ashamed of ourselves, because the targets were real people who had not agreed to the game; the reaction to the Steve Martin exchange in Very Important Pennis (1996) suggests we were not the only ones.

The Mackenzie Crook connection is the one to watch. Small Prophets (2026) is their second project together, and Kaye plays Roy in a suburban comedy we scored 84 for finding feeling in folk magic and ordinary friendship. He is not the reason we liked it. The warmth belongs to Pearce Quigley and Lauren Patel, and Kaye fits in without pulling the show towards himself, which for a man who made his name by pulling every room towards himself is a change. Crook writes peculiar people with affection rather than for laughs, and Kaye seems content in that company to be one of several. Whether this is a new phase or a rest between louder ones we cannot yet say. He has called his more than five hundred performances as Mr Wormwood the highlight of his working life, so we would not assume the loud ones are finished.