Adrian Bower
Adrian Bower is an actor, born 1970.
Adrian Bower, from Chester, spent the first three series of Teachers as Brian Steadman, the PE and geography master, in a comedy where the staff behaved considerably worse than the pupils. It remains the role he is best known for in Britain, and it fixed the type he has been usefully cast against ever since: big, blokeish, apparently uncomplicated.
The Last Kingdom put that to better use in 2015. As Leofric, the Wessex fighting man, Bower had to sell a soldier who is coarse, funny and completely serious about war all at once, and he moves between those modes without signposting any of it. It is a supporting performance that anchors a great deal of the early episodes.
Around those two sits a working British character-actor career. Joe in Gimme Gimme Gimme, Nathan in Dirty Filthy Love, a drama about obsessive compulsive disorder, DC Des Hairihan in the police-procedural spoof A Touch of Cloth, a soldier in the vampire comedy Eat Locals, the science-fiction colony drama Outcasts, Mount Pleasant, the blacksmith in Jude back in 1996, and the Captain of the Guard in the 2025 Snow White. He also works as a voice artist, which is where a lot of a career like this quietly lives.
Movies (4)
TV (6)
Where to start with Adrian Bower
Teachers first, and specifically the first three series, because that is the whole of his run and Steadman is the character the ensemble bounces off. It is a very late-nineties kind of comedy, closer to a hangover than a sitcom, and it either lands immediately or not at all.
If it does not, go straight to The Last Kingdom, where Leofric is the most complete thing on his resume and needs no context beyond the first few episodes. A Touch of Cloth is for people who like a joke every eight seconds, Dirty Filthy Love is the serious pick, and Eat Locals is silly fun with a good cast. Jude and Snow White are useful mainly as bookends, nearly thirty years apart, on the same reliable presence.