Tony Pitts is the man behind the desk: the senior officer, the sergeant, the Yorkshire voice that says no and means it. He does it well and often. The performance we want you to see is the one where he does nothing of the kind.
Fi1m perspective
He is usually the one who has already decided. A detective chief superintendent, a sergeant, a captain, a copper in a corridor: a man with a Sheffield-bred voice and enough shoulder to fill a doorway, whose job in the scene is to stand in the hero's way. Pitts knows this about himself. "I've got a bit of gravitas, that Yorkshire thing and a bit of size so I invariably play hard or corrupt – or hard and corrupt – people." It is a fair account of a good deal of the work. We think it undersells the part of it we like best.
The career has an odd shape. Ken Loach cast him in Looks and Smiles (1981) while he was training as a truck mechanic, and he then spent a decade as Archie Brooks in Emmerdale (1983–1993), which made his face familiar in a way that is useful to an actor and not always helpful. After some quieter years spent partly writing, the authority parts arrived from the late 2000s and have not stopped: John Nolan in the Red Riding films (2009), Sergeant Moss in Peaky Blinders (2013), DCS Les Hargreaves in Line of Duty (2014), Captain Pterro in Rogue One (2016), Richard Alderson in All Creatures Great and Small (2020). Alongside them he wrote and produced Funny Cow (2017), in which he also appears, and he writes for radio, a medium he has said he loves.
The performance we would send a reader to is the one furthest from the brief. In Scott & Bailey (2011) he plays Adrian, husband to Lesley Sharp's Janet, a man with no rank, no door to block and no decision to announce. Pitts gives him a tired decency that makes their house feel lived in rather than written, and in a series built around women across interview tables we found ourselves looking forward to the kitchen scenes, because he plays Adrian's weariness as a plain fact about the marriage and not as a grievance against it. It is small work and it is exact. In Giri/Haji (2019) he is Angling, one face among many in a crowded cast, and we did not single him out; the series had other things to do.
The hard men are done well, and the risk with a face that reliable is that people stop looking at it. He has said the typecasting limits variety and that he accepts it as steady work, which is an honest thing for an actor to say and a slightly sad one. The directors who have come back to him more than once, Adrian Shergold, Gerard Johnson and Paddy Considine (Journeyman, 2017), and his three films with Maxine Peake, suggest some of them have noticed there is more. Casting directors know exactly what Tony Pitts is for. We would like one of them to forget.
Biography
Tony Pitts is an English actor and screenwriter. Born on 10 October 1962 in Sheffield, he began his career with a role in the 1981 film Looks and Smiles before appearing as Archie Brooks in the soap opera Emmerdale from 1983 to 1993.
Pitts has played supporting roles in films including War Horse (2011), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) and Funny Cow (2017), which he also wrote. On television he has appeared in Peaky Blinders, Line of Duty, The North Water and Giri/Haji (2019) as Steve Angling. He co-founded the production company Make Me Films with actress Katherine Kelly.
