Greg Hicks
The stage is where Greg Hicks built his reputation, and the screen work is the part of it most people encounter by accident. He trained at Rose Bruford College and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1976, and the classical grounding shows. He was given the 2003 Critics' Circle Theatre Award for Best Shakespearian Performance and nominated for an Olivier the following year, both for playing Coriolanus at the Old Vic.
On camera he has been cast almost exclusively as authority, usually the cold kind. He played Pontius Pilate twice inside about a year, in the television series The Bible and then in the feature Son of God, and the reading is consistent both times: a career administrator who finds the whole business tiresome and signs off on it anyway. He was Aenilianus in Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire and Jekuthiel in The Ten Commandments, so a substantial share of his filmography is men in robes making decisions about other people's lives.
The rest is scattered and often small: the Black Knight General in Snow White and the Huntsman, Captain Box in The Mercy, the producer Zev Bufman in Burton and Taylor, a QC in the 1990s series The Knock, Aidan Pratt in the 1987 adaptation Fortunes of War. The most recent entry is the one closest to his actual habitat, Pa Joad in the National Theatre Live recording of The Grapes of Wrath.
Movies (5)
TV (5)
Where to start with Greg Hicks
His screen work is scattered, so pick by appetite rather than by chronology. The Bible and Son of God make the natural pair, because they let you watch one actor play the same man twice in quick succession and adjust the temperature slightly. Hicks's Pilate is bored rather than cruel, which lands as more unsettling than the usual reading.
Then go to National Theatre Live: The Grapes of Wrath, where he plays Pa Joad. It is the closest thing available to seeing him do what he actually does for a living, and the difference in register between filmed theatre and television drama is instructive on its own.
After that, The Mercy is the best-made film in the list, Burton and Taylor gives him a rare part in modern dress, and Snow White and the Huntsman is the one where he is under armour and you may not recognise him at all. Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire is for Roman completists.