David O'Hara
David O'Hara is an actor, born 1965.
A graduate of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, David O'Hara has spent thirty years being the most alarming person in other people's films. He was born in Glasgow in 1965, and the training is about the only formal thing in the career.
Stephen in Braveheart is the template. He is an Irishman who talks to God, kills without warning, and gets most of the film's laughs, and O'Hara plays him with a bright, friendly unpredictability far more frightening than a scowl. The trick recurs. Fitzy in The Departed is a mobster who is dim in a way that might turn violent mid-sentence. Mr. X in Wanted is a hitman with about two lines and no visible interior. Albert Runcorn in the Harry Potter finale is bureaucratic menace in a good suit.
He is also better at quiet than the casting suggests. Hotel Rwanda uses him in a small journalist's role and it is the least mannered thing in his filmography. The Tudors gave him a poet at court. Luther gave him an antagonist in a series that only works when its antagonists are plausible.
He has kept working steadily on both sides of the Atlantic: Scottish and Irish films, American genre pictures like Cold Pursuit and Contraband, and lately Kevin Costner's Horizon westerns. He is a character actor in the old sense of the term. Nobody buys a ticket because of him, and a surprising number of good films are better for his being in them.
Movies (31)
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)
- The Departed (2006)
- Braveheart (1995)
- Cowboys & Aliens (2011)
- Wanted (2008)
- Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (2024)
- Cold Pursuit (2019)
- Hotel Rwanda (2004)
- Doomsday (2008)
- The Devil's Own (1997)
- Contraband (2012)
- Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 2 (2024)
- Tristan & Isolde (2006)
- Crossfire Trail (2001)
- Jesus (1999)
- The Professor and the Madman (2019)
- Link (1986)
- Some Mother's Son (1996)
- Made (2001)
- The Kid (2010)
- Deus (2022)
- The Matchmaker (1997)
- Reach Me (2014)
- Resurrected (1989)
- Whole Lotta Sole (2011)
- The Match (1999)
- Attack on Darfur (2009)
- Den of Lions (2003)
- Stander (2003)
- Jack Said (2009)
TV (4)
Where to start with David O'Hara
Braveheart first, because it is the performance that made him and the one that still explains him. He arrives an hour in, steals every scene he is handed, and does it in a film with no shortage of shouting.
The Departed is the second stop and the better film, though his part there is smaller and much stupider by design. From there Hotel Rwanda shows the register nobody casts him in, and it is the one I would push hardest. The Tudors and Luther are the television to try, the first for period swagger, the second for a proper villain. Wanted and Cold Pursuit are efficient genre paydays. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is a single memorable appearance and a good spot-the-actor moment if you have seen the series a dozen times.
The famous eight minutes
The career pattern is a short, unforgettable appearance in a very large film. Stephen the Irishman in Braveheart is the one people quote, and Fitzy in The Departed is the sharpest of them. Neither part is longer than a few scenes.
The serious films
When somebody gives him a real part he takes it seriously. Hotel Rwanda is the best of these, Some Mother's Son is the Helen Mirren film about the hunger strikes, and Stander is a South African true story almost nobody saw.
Television and the later work
Television gives him room the films do not. The Tudors and The District are the long runs, Luther is the good British one, and Kevin Costner's Horizon is the recent western that keeps promising more chapters. The accent never goes anywhere.