Tom Bennett
Tom Bennett is an actor.
Small British comedy parts built Tom Bennett before anything else did. He played Christopher in PhoneShop, a sitcom about a mobile phone shop and the people who cannot leave it, and he has worked repeatedly for two directors with very different methods: Christopher Guest, who improvises, in Mascots and Family Tree, and Ricky Gervais, who does not, in After Life and Life on the Road.
His particular gift is playing men of total confidence and no information. Sir James Martin in Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship is the definitive version, a wealthy suitor who has misunderstood nearly everything he has ever been told and is delighted about all of it. Bennett never signals the joke; he plays the man as entirely satisfied, and lets the sentences collapse on their own. The performance won him the London Critics Circle Award, and it remains the clearest evidence of what he can do with a decent script.
Since then the work has got bigger without necessarily getting better. He is Ulf in House of the Dragon, Fred in Rocketman, Ben in Patrick, Miles in the American sitcom A.P. Bio, and Galloway in Wildcat. He also completed a long run as Del Boy in the stage musical of Only Fools and Horses at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, which is a much harder assignment than it sounds: the audience arrives already knowing exactly how the part should be played. Earlier television includes Foyle's War, Upstairs Downstairs and the storytelling series Crackanory.
Movies (6)
TV (8)
Where to start with Tom Bennett
Love & Friendship is the only sensible starting point. Sir James Martin is a supporting part in someone else's Jane Austen adaptation, and Bennett quietly walks off with the film by refusing to play the character as an idiot who knows he is an idiot. The scene about peas is the one everybody quotes, and it earns it.
For the register underneath that, PhoneShop is where the persona was assembled, and Mascots shows how he works inside Christopher Guest's improvised setup, where nobody hands you a punchline.
House of the Dragon is the biggest platform he has had and uses him as comic relief in a very grim show, which is a fair trade. After that, Rocketman and Wildcat are brief, A.P. Bio is the most conventional sitcom work, and Family Tree is the deep cut worth finding.