Ross Boatman
Ross Boatman is an actor, born 1964.
Half of Ross Boatman's working life has been spent at a poker table. He is an English actor with a long television record and a professional poker player, part of the group known as the Hendon Mob, which is not a sideline in the celebrity sense but an actual second occupation.
The acting came first and it came big. He played the firefighter Kevin Medhurst in ITV's London's Burning from 1988 to 1995, and again in 2000, a run long enough that a generation of British viewers knew his face without ever learning his name. Since then he has worked steadily in the middle of British television: Derek in the BBC Two comedy Mum from 2016 to 2019, Del Flynn in the Netflix thriller Stay Close, Noah in Cheaters, the football drama Dream Team, and the soap job, EastEnders, where he joined as Harvey Monroe.
Mum is the best of it. It is a slow, quiet, half-hour comedy about grief and about the people who will not leave you alone, and Boatman's Derek is one of the most precisely irritating characters in recent British television, a man so pleased with himself that the show can raise a laugh purely by having him walk into a room. The film credits are smaller: a taxi driver, a detective, a cheery card dealer, other people's British films.
Movies (4)
TV (5)
Where to start with Ross Boatman
Mum first, and it is not close. A comedy that almost never raises its voice, with Boatman as Derek, a man whose confidence is entirely unearned and the show's cruellest and funniest running joke. Watch from the first episode; it accumulates.
Stay Close is the opposite register, a Harlan Coben thriller built for weekend bingeing, and he is good in it as a father under pressure. Cheaters is the short-form comedy option and Dream Team the football soap that ran for years.
The films are supporting parts in other people's projects, but two are worth the time: Cassandra's Dream, a Woody Allen tragedy set in London, and The Storyteller, the Jim Henson series, where he turns up as a page in one of the best-looking things British television has ever made.