Shaun Parkes plays men who would rather not be looked at, and he makes the not-wanting visible. In Mangrove that reluctance is the whole performance, and it is the best thing in the film. Elsewhere British film has mostly used him in passing.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Shaun Parkes after a raid in Mangrove. The police have been through Frank Crichlow's restaurant, Shabier Kirchner's camera is down on the floor with a knocked-over colander, and when it comes back to Parkes he is not shaking and he is not shouting. He is looking at the damage the way a man looks at a bill. Parkes has said of the character that "Frank is the hero who doesn't want to be a hero. He just wants to run a West Indian restaurant," and that is the performance: the wish to be left alone, held in the shoulders, while the film turns him into something else.
He came through RADA in the mid-1990s and was first noticed as Koop in Justin Kerrigan's Human Traffic (1999), a club-culture comedy with more energy than depth, where he was one voice in a loud ensemble. The Mummy Returns (2001) gave him Izzy Buttons and a bigger screen. Notes on a Scandal (2006) gave him Bill Rumer, and our own review did not single him out; Richard Eyre's film belongs to Judi Dench and nobody else gets much room in it. Television kept him working, with the lead in Moses Jones (2009), recurring parts in Doctor Who, Line of Duty and Lost in Space, and DI Vince Ruiz in The Suspect (2022). The stage ran alongside all of it, at the National Theatre and Shakespeare's Globe, in Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange and Kwame Kwei-Armah's Elmina's Kitchen.
What he does well is pressure. He is cast as ordinary men inside events too large for them, and he plays the cost of keeping quiet rather than the relief of speaking up. In Mangrove that is the entire job. Steve McQueen gives the raids no music and no warning, and Parkes answers each one with a little less than the last, so that when the story moves to the trial and Letitia Wright and Malachi Kirby take over the talking, he is still the person we watch, because he is the one who never asked for any of it. We were angry for most of the film, and a good deal of that anger was Parkes's doing: he plays Frank's patience so plainly that every raid lands as a theft from a man who has already paid.
The reservation is not about the acting but about how little of it the screen has asked for. Thirty years in, most of his film work is supporting parts, and his television leads have not travelled far. British television finds a detective series for every actor eventually, and Parkes has had two. We would rather somebody found him another Frank.
Biography
Shaun Parkes is an English actor known for roles in film, television and theatre. He was born on 9 February 1973 in London. He studied drama at Seltec College from the age of 16 and later trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).
Parkes made his breakthrough in the 1999 film Human Traffic as Koop. Subsequent film roles include Izzy Buttons in The Mummy Returns (2001) and Bill Rumer in Notes on a Scandal (2006). On television he has appeared in Doctor Who (2005), Line of Duty (2012) and Lost in Space (2018–2019). He played Frank Crichlow in the 2020 anthology series Small Axe, for which he received a BAFTA nomination for leading actor. His theatre credits include Blue/Orange, Elmina's Kitchen and Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare's Globe. He also starred as the lead in the BBC series Moses Jones.
