Christopher Stollery
Christopher Stollery is an actor, born 1965.
Two careers run in parallel here and only one of them is on screen. Stollery is an actor, filmmaker and playwright whose longest professional attachment has been to Sydney's Bell Shakespeare Company, a relationship that ran across fifteen years, and he has made several short films of his own. Australian viewers know him from television first: a recurring turn on The Flying Doctors, the 1990s run of State Coroner, and much later Inspector Dick Kemp in Last King of the Cross.
Read down the credit list and one type keeps returning. The Interviewer in Predestination. Major Bexley in The Nightingale. Reporter Jim Moore in Truth. Principal Doyle in Transfusion. Hildebrandt in Terminus. Men with a title, a desk and a procedure to follow. Stollery is unusually good at letting an institution speak through a person, holding the face still while the sentence does the damage, and that is a narrower gift than range but a far more employable one.
The features have placed him inside a strong decade of Australian cinema, from a time-loop thriller to a colonial revenge picture that refuses to make its violence entertaining. The recent television is lighter work: the black comedy Frayed, and Return to Paradise, where he plays Ted Haddon. For an actor whose centre of gravity is the stage, that is a sensible way to keep the screen career ticking.
Movies (6)
TV (3)
Where to start with Christopher Stollery
Predestination is the strongest film on this list and the easiest recommendation: a time-loop thriller that keeps its nerve when the plot starts folding back on itself, with Stollery appearing as the Interviewer. If you want the performance rather than the film, go to The Nightingale instead, where he plays Major Bexley in a colonial revenge story so unsparing that plenty of viewers cannot finish it. Fair warning, and worth it.
From there, Truth gives you the newsroom register he does so well, Frayed is the comic version of the same stiffness, and Return to Paradise is the light option. The Flying Doctors is where Australian audiences met him, and Voice Activated is the small local comedy for completists.