Roger Lloyd Pack had a face built for bad news and the patience to let a joke arrive on its own. As Trigger and as Owen Newitt he turned slowness into timing, and he was a better actor than the parts most people remember him for.
Fi1m perspective
Roger Lloyd Pack's face did most of the work before he opened his mouth. It was long and mournful, the features loose, and it looked like the face of a man who had just been told something disappointing and was still deciding how to take it. In comedy he used it by doing almost nothing with it. As Trigger in Only Fools and Horses (1981–2003), the road sweeper several steps behind everyone else at the bar, he let the other actors hurry and simply waited, and the laugh came when we realised he was never going to catch up.
He had trained at RADA and spent his early years on stage, with the RSC and the National Theatre, and the sitcoms came later. Trigger made him known to the whole country; Owen Newitt in The Vicar of Dibley (1994–2007) kept him there for another thirteen years. After that came a run of parts that put him in front of much larger audiences: Barty Crouch Sr. in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), John Lumic, the man who builds the Cybermen, in Doctor Who (2006) opposite David Tennant, and Mendel in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011).
Dibley is the one we have reviewed, and Owen is the test of what we said about it: that the cast keeps the village funny without making its people contemptible. Owen is a farmer with poor hygiene and no filter, and a lesser actor would have played him as a grotesque. Lloyd Pack plays him as a man who believes he is being helpful. We laughed at Owen more than we expected to, and what did it was the delivery, which announces things nobody asked to hear in the flat, unhurried voice of someone reading out the parish notices. The joke lands because he does not appear to know it is a joke. That is a harder trick than it looks, and the series leaned on it for years.
The same stillness served him on stage in Pinter, in The Caretaker and The Homecoming, where a long pause from that face reads as menace rather than dimness. It is the same instrument turned a few degrees. The people who knew him only from the sofa never saw that side, and he knew it. "It is like an albatross in one way. If something becomes mega, like Fools, you’ve had it. I’ll never escape Trigger, I’ve learnt to live with that," he said in 2012. He did not sound bitter about it, only accurate.
Start with Dibley, where he is easiest to find. Then watch how little he is doing while everyone else talks, because that is where the acting is.
Biography
Roger Lloyd Pack was a British actor best known for his roles as the dim-witted road sweeper Trigger in the BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses (1981–2003) and as farmer Owen Newitt in The Vicar of Dibley (1994–2007).
Born in Islington, London, on 8 February 1944, he was the son of actor Charles Lloyd Pack. He attended Bedales School and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), graduating in 1965. He began his career on stage, making his debut in a production of The Shoemaker's Holiday at Northampton's Royal Theatre.
Lloyd Pack appeared in numerous films and television series, including as Barty Crouch Sr. in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005). He died of pancreatic cancer on 16 January 2014 at his home in London.
