Roger Allam's voice gets to a scene before he does: a deep, unhurried baritone that makes whatever it says sound settled. He has spent four decades lending it to men in charge, and the pleasure is in how differently he can mean it.
Fi1m perspective
Listen to a scene with Roger Allam in it and you will usually hear him before you see him. The voice is a deep baritone, pitched low and taken slowly, and it does one thing reliably: it makes the man attached to it sound as though he has been there longer than anyone else. Directors have noticed. He is cast, over and over, as detectives, politicians, officers and comfortable professionals, the men the others defer to or wish they did not have to.
The screen came late. He began in 1976 with Monstrous Regiment, a feminist theatre company, joined the RSC in 1981 and was London's first Javert when Les Misérables opened in 1985. Captain Terri Dennis in Privates on Parade at the Donmar Warehouse and Falstaff at Shakespeare's Globe in 2010 belong to the stage, and we cannot send you to them. Wider recognition waited until the mid-2000s, with The Thick of It (2005–2012) and then eleven years as DI Fred Thursday, Morse's mentor, in Endeavour (2012–2023). The one criticism anyone seems able to raise is that he was good at too many things for the public to file him under one.
The Thick of It is where we would send you first. Armando Iannucci's programme runs on panic, and Allam's Peter Mannion is a welcome change of pace from it. Everyone else shouts; he sighs, and the sigh is funnier than the shouting because it takes longer. We found ourselves waiting for his scenes the way you wait for the one adult at a party to arrive, and we were surprised how much we needed him, because the series is exhausting without somebody in it who can be bothered to be tired. It is the baritone doing comedy, and it is why John Finnemore's radio series Cabin Pressure is right to hand him Douglas Richardson.
In the cinema he is mostly a few feet from the star. Stephen Frears has cast him twice, and as Robin Janvrin in The Queen (2006) he is part of the household against which Helen Mirren's control shows as effort. V for Vendetta (2006) gives him Lewis Prothero, and gives the voice a job in a film already full of speeches. Neither is his film, and he does not try to make it one.
Endeavour is the other kind of man. Thursday is working class, weary and decent, and Allam has explained the attraction himself: "Having played a lot of sneery middle-class bastards, I was immediately attracted to the character because this was more from my actual family background – working class." We have not reviewed the series and will not judge it here, beyond noting that it is the part most people now know him by, and that it arrived when he was nearly sixty. The men in charge will keep coming, because the voice will keep making them sound right. The pleasure is in noticing how often he is letting you hear that they are wrong.
Biography
Roger Allam is an English actor born on 26 October 1953 in Bow, London. He trained at Manchester University after attending Christ's Hospital school and began his career in theatre in 1976.
Allam is known primarily for his extensive stage work. He originated the role of Inspector Javert in the original London production of the musical Les Misérables (1985). He has won three Laurence Olivier Awards, including for Best Actor as Captain Terri Dennis in Privates on Parade (2001) and as Falstaff in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 (2010).
On screen, he played Peter Mannion MP in the BBC series The Thick of It (2007–2012). Other notable television roles include DCI Fred Thursday in Endeavour (2012–2023) and Illyrio Mopatis in Game of Thrones (2011). He is married to actress Rebecca Saire.
