Paul McGann is the actor you watch listening. He gave Withnail & I its conscience by reacting rather than performing, and the film career that ought to have followed never quite did; television and audio got the better part of him instead.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Paul McGann in Withnail & I (1987) while Richard E. Grant is talking, which is most of the time. Bruce Robinson gives Withnail the lines and Marwood the job of hearing them, and McGann does that job without once asking for a laugh of his own. He flinches, he calculates, he looks at the door. Our review called his the less conspicuous task, and the film depends on it: two men shouting for our attention would make a long evening, while one man shouting and one man wondering how much more he can stand is a comedy with sadness underneath. It moved us more than we expected, and it was his face that did it, the face of a man quietly doing the sums on a friendship.
He had already carried a series by then, as Percy Toplis in The Monocled Mutineer (1986), and the year of Withnail also gave him a supporting part in Empire of the Sun (1987). Then, for an actor of that promise, the films came sparingly. There was Golic in Alien³ (1992), and not a great deal else on that scale. Television took him instead: the Doctor in the 1996 Doctor Who television film, and Lieutenant William Bush through Hornblower (1998–2002). He is most often cast as the sensible man beside the flamboyant one, the everyman in the cult comedy or the ensemble, and he is good enough at it that the casting has followed him around.
What he does well is react. The naturalism was there from his first film and has not left, and he is at his best when a script gives him little to say and something to watch, as in The Undertaker (2023), where much of the performance is wordless. The other strand is the period piece with a moral shadow across it, Toplis being the first of several. What he does less often, or has less often been asked to do, is dominate a scene. There is no McGann film in the way there is a Grant scene. The complaint that his film career went quiet after such a start is a fair one, and he seems to have felt it himself. As he put it in 2009: "As an actor, you get hired to repeat yourself. It wears you out."
The part he has repeated longest is the Doctor, whom he has played in audio dramas since 2001 and on screen only in the 1996 film and two returns, in 2013 and 2022. That is a strange shape for a career: the role most people attach to him is one they have mostly heard rather than seen. It suits him better than it should. If you want to understand what he does, put Withnail & I on again and, this time, do not watch Withnail.
Biography
Paul McGann is an English actor. He was born on 14 November 1959 in Kensington, Liverpool.
He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. McGann first came to prominence playing Percy Toplis in the 1986 BBC serial The Monocled Mutineer. His film debut was as the character credited '... & I' in the 1987 comedy Withnail & I.
He is also known for playing the Eighth Doctor in the 1996 Doctor Who television film and subsequent audio dramas and appearances, as well as roles in Alien³ (1992), The Three Musketeers (1993) and the series Luther.
