It’s tough being a beautiful young chap – if not always in real life, then definitely for those making their career and livelihood on our screens. I once listened (while playing the world’s smallest violin) to the indisputably handsome Ioan Gruffudd lament that he wasn’t first choice for the breadth of roles he was after. “I can only really be a leading man,” he explained, and helpfully drew an air circle around his face, “looking like this.”
I was reminded of this conversation having binged, like everyone else, on Dept Q. There’s nothing new under the Scottish sun here, really – this Danish series of cold case crime novels has been given a transformative new lease of life, with lots of Netflix money, direction by Queen’s Gambit showrunner Scott Frank, a bleak Edinburgh setting, sharp writing and a great cast led by Matthew Goode as DCI Carl Morck. He’s angry, lonely and guilty about an incident in the past that saw a young officer tragically killed and even his own partner paralysed.
It’s a career-changing performance: full of twitching cynicism with glimpses of compassion, all the more exciting when you consider Goode’s posh, unruffled schtick in everything from Brideshead Revisited to Downton Abbey. His Lord Snowdon in The Crown gave a hint of unrest behind the arched eyebrow, but Morck is something else.
Dept Q producer Andy Harries describes Goode as “handsome, charming and best known for those suave roles where a touch of the Hugh Grant is required, but he is so much more than that.” Well, yes, and so is the modern-day Hugh Grant, as we discovered when he retired his Four Weddings era floppy fop and brought us his tour de force as scandal-hit politician Jeremy Thorpe, then managed to top that with glorious self-mockery in Paddington 2. Perhaps Harries was thus inspired; in recruiting Goode for Dept Q he reveals, “casting against type was the idea”.
They say that up to the age of 40 your face is God-given, after that it’s the face you deserve. Maybe the same goes for acting roles. Of course, this lot get first pick of good scripts, but lots of handsome younger actors have fallen by the wayside, so it’s a credit to this bunch that they’ve kept going, accepted the necessary swapping of the appeal of youth for character, complexity and all the other great consolations of age. Just like the rest of us, but with everyone watching. What’s the secret?
The wonderful Rufus Sewell summed it up beautifully when I put this to him a while ago. He said: “I had a huge ego as a young man, and I probably still do, trumped only by my enduring ego as an actor. That’s even bigger.”
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