Rupert Penry-Jones is the actor television calls when it needs a man who plainly went to the right school and might be lying. He is best when the charm is allowed to go sour, as in Silk, and dullest when only asked to be handsome.
Fi1m perspective
Clive Reader QC smiles before he says the thing that is going to cost you. In Silk (2011), Rupert Penry-Jones plays the barrister who has applied for silk at the same time as Maxine Peake's Martha Costello, and who is better connected and less scrupulous than she is. He never plays Clive as a villain. He plays him as a man who assumes he will be forgiven, and is usually right. We liked him far more than we meant to, and were cross with ourselves each time Martha paid for it; the charm is real, which is why the betrayals land.
That is the Penry-Jones part, and British television has been handing it to him for a long time. He came up through the stage, at the RSC, the Almeida and the National, and took small screen roles from 1994 before North Square (2000) and Cambridge Spies (2003), where he played Donald Maclean, made him a face. Spooks made him a name. He joined as Adam Carter in 2004 and led the series for four years, and he has said that "since Spooks I feel that my name is on a list that it never used to be on." The leads followed: DI Joseph Chandler in Whitechapel (2009–2013), Clive in Silk, and then America, with Mr Quinlan in The Strain (2014–2017) and Thomas Hamilton in Black Sails (2014–2017).
What he does well is a particular kind of English ease: the man who knows which fork, which judge, which door. When a script gives that ease something to hide, as Peter Moffat's does in Silk, he is good company and dangerous with it. When the script only wants the surface, he is handsome and not much else. That was our complaint about Spooks, where Adam Carter was a handsome man given handsome-man problems while Hermione Norris's Ros Myers did the real work of the middle series. He has talked about being prejudged for seeming posh, and the casting has not always helped him argue otherwise. Persuasion (2007) gave him Captain Wentworth, which is the right school again with a ship attached.
The Strain put him under prosthetics for three seasons, and he has said he would not do it again. We are not surprised; the best of him is in the robing room, not under rubber. Start with Silk, where Peake gives him someone worth betraying, then go back to the third series of Spooks and notice how much the part asks of him and how little. Someone should write him a man whose charm is not enough. Clive Reader is the closest anyone has come, and it is why Silk is where we would send you first.
Biography
Rupert Penry-Jones is an English actor. He was born in London on 22 September 1970, the son of actors Peter Penry-Jones and Angela Thorne. He trained at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School after attending Dulwich College.
Penry-Jones is known for playing Adam Carter in the BBC series Spooks (2004–2008). His other television roles include Clive Reader in Silk, DI Joseph Chandler in Whitechapel, Thomas Hamilton in Black Sails and Mr Quinlan in The Strain. Film credits include Match Point (2005) and The Batman (2022). He won a Crime Thriller Award for his performance in Spooks.
