Tim Key

Charles Heath, in The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025), offers Herb a cup of tea before Herb is out of his wet clothes. He answers questions nobody has asked and narrates his own walk to the kitchen. This is the Key part, and it is more or less the man he has been playing for fifteen years: someone who has learned to fill every gap because of what might otherwise be heard in it. He talks in puns, mostly, in a flat, hopeful voice, and the joke is never that he is stupid. It is that he has rehearsed being interesting and got it slightly wrong.

He came to it sideways. He joined the Cambridge Footlights in 2001 without being a Cambridge student, met Tom Basden there and formed the sketch group Cowards with him, then spent years at the Edinburgh Fringe reading short, absurd poems, often off playing cards. Wider notice came in 2010 as Sidekick Simon in Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge, the normalising and faintly irritating foil to Steve Coogan, a part he kept through Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013) and later series. Supporting turns in Peep Show and Inside No. 9 followed, and the poetry and radio never stopped. The features are recent: Wallis Island, co-written with Basden and directed by James Griffiths, who also made their 2007 short; Pigeon Man in Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 (2025), a part our review found no cause to mention; and The Paper, the American spin-off of The Office, the same year.

What he does that other comic actors do not is sincerity with the volume turned down. Sidney in Love Wedding Repeat (2020) is written as dull and nothing else, and Key plays him as a man delivering anecdotes he has practised, with a look on his face that hopes nobody will interrupt. We laughed properly twice in that film and both times it was him; the rest of it sat around a handsome Italian villa and waited for a farce that landed one joke in three. Charles in Wallis Island is Sidney with a reason, and Basden knows how to write him one. The script has a single engine, that Charles cannot stop talking and Herb cannot stand it, and Key keeps it running far longer than it should. The film gets round, in its own time, to why Charles talks, and we will not say what it finds.

The limits are real. He plays one man, give or take a haircut, and most of the people who know how to write for that man have known him since 2001. He has said that comic and dramatic acting are both "all about finding the truth", and the truth he finds is always the same small one: a person alone in a room, keen to be liked. That is enough for a supporting part in almost any British comedy, and it is enough for a lead when the film around him is about loneliness. Start with Wallis Island, where the talking has somewhere to go, and wait to see whether anyone else can give him a reason to stop.