Thomas Brodie-Sangster

Watch him at Cromwell's table in Wolf Hall (2015). Mark Rylance is doing almost nothing, which is the point, and Thomas Brodie-Sangster's Rafe Sadler is doing slightly less: listening, passing things, receiving the master's dry remarks as if they were meant for him. The household scenes are the warmest in the series and he is a good part of the reason. This is what he does. He is the young man at the edge of the frame who has noticed something and will be asked about it later.

The career divides in two and the first half is the one people remember. He was the boy in Love Actually (2003) and Nanny McPhee (2005), and most writing about him still starts there, which must be tiresome. Nowhere Boy (2009), for Sam Taylor-Johnson, gave him Paul McCartney, and it is the first place you can see the adult method: a real person played small and exact, with no impersonation. Then came the years that paid for the rest, Jojen Reed in Game of Thrones (2013–2014) and Newt in the Maze Runner films (2014–2018).

The rest is television, and it is where his best work is. In Godless (2017) his Whitey Winn is quick with a pistol and slow with everything else, the boy every western needs and most westerns waste. We found ourselves fonder of Whitey than the series had any right to expect, because Brodie-Sangster plays the gap between the fast hands and the slow head as something the boy knows about and hopes nobody else has spotted. Scott Frank, who made Godless, used him again as Benny Watts in The Queen's Gambit (2020). He was Malcolm McLaren in Pistol (2022), then The Artful Dodger (2023), then back to Rafe for Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (2024). Directors who have had him once tend to ask again, which tells you how he is to work with, and also that he is being asked for the same thing.

What he does not have is a lead in something that matters. The stillness that makes him useful in an ensemble may read as absence when there is nobody beside him to react to, and a face that still gets him cast as the apprentice does not help. He has said he has always hated the idea of getting typecast and gets bored very easily. Good. Boredom is the only thing that has ever moved an actor out of the seat at the end of the table, and he has earned the one at the head.