Sean Maguire
Sean Maguire is an actor, born 1976.
Maguire has been working since he was a child, and the career is a good illustration of what that does to an actor: he arrived fully professional and then spent decades having to be taken seriously. His first job, at five, put him opposite Laurence Olivier. He became properly famous as Tegs Ratcliffe in the BBC school drama Grange Hill, and moved from there to EastEnders as Aidan Brosnan. Sources disagree about exactly how old he was and when he left, but the shape is unmistakable: the fame arrived before the craft had anywhere to put it.
The next stretch was music and American sitcoms. He had a parallel career as a singer, then worked steadily in US network comedy as Donovan Brink on Eve and Kyle Lendo on The Class, which is a decent living and no kind of legacy.
What actually stuck was fairytale casting. He played Robin Hood on Once Upon a Time and again on its Wonderland spin-off, Prince Charming in a 2001 fantasy comedy, and Leonidas in Meet the Spartans, a parody that needs an actor to hold the heroic pose absolutely straight while everything around him collapses. He is good at that specific job: the handsome, unironic centre that a joke or a fairy tale can be built against. The recent work is smaller genre films and British procedural guest roles, which is what happens to leading men who never quite got the lead.
Movies (7)
TV (10)
Where to start with Sean Maguire
For the version of him that stuck, watch Once Upon a Time: his Robin Hood has to be sincere in a show that runs entirely on sincerity, and he never winks. Carry on to Once Upon a Time in Wonderland if you want the same character in a stranger key.
For the opposite proof, Meet the Spartans asks him to play Leonidas with total conviction inside a parody, and the film only works to the extent that he refuses to join the joke. Prince Charming is the daft companion piece.
The British material is where the actor is. EastEnders and Waterland cover the early years, Death in Paradise and Scott & Bailey are the grown-up guest roles, and The Class shows how the American sitcom phase fitted him, which is: not badly, not memorably.