Paul Rhys

In The Deal (2003), Paul Rhys's Peter Mandelson is barely on screen. He appears at a door, says something quiet to Tony Blair, and is gone before Blair, or we, have worked out what was offered. He does not raise his voice and he hardly moves. We found those few scenes the coldest in a film full of warm, loud men, and we meant it as praise; Stephen Frears gives him a handful of minutes and he spends them saying less than anyone else in the film.

That has been the Rhys method for nearly forty years. He was on screen as a student in Absolute Beginners (1986), then opposite Colin Firth in Richard Eyre's Falklands drama Tumbledown (1988), then as Theo van Gogh to Tim Roth's Vincent in Robert Altman's Vincent & Theo (1990), and as Sydney Chaplin, another famous man's brother, in Richard Attenborough's Chaplin (1992). By the end of that decade he had gone back to the stage: Edgar in King Lear at the National in 1997, Angelo in Measure for Measure there in 2004. The screen work in between was mostly television, with the odd feature such as From Hell (2001), and television cast him again and again as the undead, in Being Human, Da Vinci's Demons and A Discovery of Witches. "I'm never my own class," he has said. "I'm very rarely human."

Then two features in one year. In Saltburn (2023) he is Duncan, the butler at the big house, a part with hardly any lines, built out of how he stands in a doorway and how long he looks before he leaves it. It is a small part, small enough that our review did not find room for him, which is a fact about the film rather than about him. In Napoleon (2023) he is Talleyrand, one of the two men who make and unmake the Emperor, and the trouble is the cutting: Claire Simpson and Sam Restivo run the years as captions and postcards, and Talleyrand never gets a scene long enough to show how he does it. Rhys is exact in every one he gets. There are not enough of them.

The reservation is the one that follows any actor with this much theatre in him. His performances are built, you can see the joinery, and in a modern-dress ensemble where everyone is talking over everyone else it can look like a man holding a pose; the complaint has been made of his stage work, at the Almeida in Uncle Vanya in 2016. On screen it is more often the point. Rhys plays people who settled what they think before the scene began, and that stillness reads either as power or as something not quite alive, which is why directors keep handing him the aristocrat and the vampire. Emerald Fennell has used him twice and Richard Eyre twice. Somebody should now give him a film in which he is allowed to stay past the doorway.