Gary Carr
Gary Carr is an actor, born 1986.
Music runs all the way through Carr's casting history, and not by accident: he is a dancer, a singer and a musician as well as an actor. He came up on British television, spending several years as Fidel Best in the BBC's Caribbean-set detective series Death in Paradise and playing Millsy in the army comedy Bluestone 42, then took the role that travelled: Jack Ross, an American jazz singer, in Downton Abbey, which is not among the credits listed here.
American work followed, including a main role in The Deuce, also not among these credits. What is here shows the range he moved into afterwards. He is Clyde X in Genius, an anthology drama about real historical figures; Hawk in the New York manhunt thriller 21 Bridges; Jeff in an episode of Modern Love; and Wilf Netherton in The Peripheral, the William Gibson adaptation, which is the largest screen part on this page.
The one to argue about is Bolden, where he plays Buddy Bolden, the New Orleans cornetist generally credited as the first jazz bandleader and about whom almost nothing survives. The role needs a musician and a screen presence at the same time, and it is the clearest statement anywhere here of what he can do.
Movies (2)
TV (5)
Where to start with Gary Carr
Bolden is the natural first stop, because it asks for everything he has: a biographical drama about the first jazz bandleader in which the performance has to carry music, myth and a near-total absence of documentation. The film is uneven. He is not.
The Peripheral is the biggest and most watchable thing on the list, an adaptation of a William Gibson novel where he plays Wilf Netherton and works as the audience's guide into a very strange future London. Begin there if you want a series rather than a film.
Death in Paradise is the comfort watch and the role British viewers know him for, sunlit crime puzzles with a rotating cast. 21 Bridges is the straight thriller, Genius the prestige anthology, and Modern Love the short-story format, one episode, one romance. Bluestone 42 is the outlier, a comedy about a bomb disposal unit that is much better than that description makes it sound.