Toby Jones

Toby Jones often tells us how a man occupies a room before the dialogue tells us who he is. Posture, gesture and voice do much of the work, with the risk that we notice the character’s peculiarities before his feelings. His breakthrough as Truman Capote in Infamous (2006) gave that detailed physical acting a leading role to sustain. We value the nuance in that performance more than the resemblance.

In Frost/Nixon (2008), he plays Swifty Lazar in Ron Howard’s tightly organised account of the interviews. We recommend the film, though not as the place to discover what Jones can do. The tension comes from the contest between the two leads, with Frank Langella making Nixon uncomfortably sympathetic. Howard’s sporting structure makes things too tidy, but the acting carries it. Jones has a supporting place here, rather than the sustained attention that Infamous afforded him.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) makes the problem more obvious. Jones’s Basil Shaw gets the 1944 train prologue, an unusually action-heavy assignment for an actor whose particular skill is in small physical details. James Mangold gives Harrison Ford a persuasive weariness, but surrounds him with chases that leave little reason to care about the people taking part. We were bored by the Tangier pursuit because we could not place the cars, the tuk-tuk and the people in the same space. There is little an attentive supporting actor can do about that.

Other work offers a better route into what he can do. Berberian Sound Studio (2012) gives him Gilderoy, a character coming apart; Detectorists (2014) gives his Lance room for both comedy and vulnerability. The movement between leads and supporting parts matters more here than any neat progression towards bigger films. We would start with Detectorists, where there is time to notice the person behind the mannerisms.