Roger Nsengiyumva

In Time Bandits (2024) Roger Nsengiyumva holds the map. He reads it wrong, every time, with the calm of a man who has never once been right and sees no reason to start now. It is a small part in a large and gentle series, and it is the one bandit of the five built on a straight face. Most of the others are playing bigger; he is playing quieter, and the quietness is where the joke lives.

That stillness was there from the start. An actor who left Rwanda as a baby and grew up in Norfolk, he was cast as Fabrice in Africa United (2010), a road film about Rwandan teenagers, after being spotted in a family photograph, with no drama school behind him. Sixteen (2013) gave him a lead as Jumah, a former child soldier adjusting to London, and the reviews noticed how little he needed to do to show a boy carrying something too heavy. Television followed: Armchair Detectives (2017), Informer (2018), You Don't Know Me (2021), with stage work at the National Theatre and the Young Vic in between, twice for the director Yaël Farber.

Informer is where we rate him. Dadir Hassan is a volatile British-Somali youth drawn into the series' counter-terrorism plot, and the part could have been a device, somebody for Nabhaan Rizwan's Raza to worry about. Nsengiyumva plays him as charm with a tremor under it, so that we never knew which way the next scene would go. We caught ourselves worrying about Dadir during the stretches when the plot had wandered off to arrange its next surprise, and that is Jonny Campbell's doing as much as his: the direction gives the supporting cast room, and he fills it. He has said he is 'very much up for playing emotionally vulnerable people', and it shows. He does not go looking for the sympathy; he lets it arrive.

The pattern is clear enough. He is cast as young men carrying something, displacement, trauma, the pull of the wrong people, and he carries it with restraint. The question is what happens when the weight is taken away. Time Bandits answered it with a map and a straight face, and the answer was pleasant but not much more; a comedy that gives one note to each of five bandits does not have room for what he does best. Coverage of his career has had a habit of leading with where he was born rather than what he does on screen, and the parts have tended to follow the coverage. Tomb Raider (2018) gave him a supporting part called Rog. Someone should hand him a lead with no history to carry, and see what he does with the weight off.