Ford Kiernan
In Scotland, Ford Kiernan needs no introduction and gets one anyway: actor, comedian and writer, and one half of the partnership with Greg Hemphill that produced the BBC Scotland sketch show Chewin' the Fat and, out of it, the sitcom Still Game. He plays Jack Jarvis, one of two Glasgow pensioners whose entire comic engine is boredom and grievance.
He has also led other series, as Archie Henderson in Dear Green Place and Colin Holliday in Happy Hollidays, neither of which is among the credits listed here. That gap matters, because the television work is where the career actually lives.
What is here is the smaller film side of it: the Black Joke Chief in Gangs of New York, an interrogator in the Iain Banks adaptation Complicity, Gavin in Then Came You, and two voice parts, one of them in the Scottish animated feature Sir Billi. Character-actor work in other people's films, taken between series.
Movies (5)
TV (3)
Where to start with Ford Kiernan
There is one place to start and it is Still Game. The writing is deceptively tight, the two leads have been playing off each other since sketch comedy, and Jack Jarvis is a small masterpiece of controlled grumpiness. It also travels better than its accent-thick reputation suggests, subtitles or not.
After that the pickings are honest rather than rich. Gangs of New York gives him a period bit part in a Scorsese crowd scene, Complicity is the darker, colder Scottish thriller, and Then Came You is the most substantial straight film role of the set. The Angels' Share uses him for voice only, so treat it as a curiosity, and Sir Billi is for completists.