Tommy Flanagan
Tommy Flanagan is an actor, born 1965.
Tommy Flanagan grew up in Glasgow, the third of five children, and carries facial scars from a mugging. That is the plain fact behind a career built almost entirely on how much information a face can carry before anyone speaks. He worked three years in the Raindog theatre company in Glasgow, took early television parts in Screen One and Taggart, and was cast in Braveheart in 1995 at the age of thirty.
The nineties made him a specialist in menace: Face/Off, The Game, The Saint, all small parts where the job was to be the man you do not want behind you. Then Gladiator gave him Cicero, the servant, and the whole instrument changed. Loyalty reads on Flanagan exactly as well as violence does, and the scars stop being a threat and become a history. That combination is why Sons of Anarchy worked for him.
Filip "Chibs" Telford, from 2008 to 2014 and then in the spin-off Mayans M.C., is his defining part: the club's conscience, the one whose accent and damage the show trusted to carry emotional weight while everyone around him postured. He has been busy ever since in genre films and prestige crime television, including Wu Assassins, Power Book IV: Force and MobLand. The best of him remains the small early stuff, though. His father in the Glasgow drama Ratcatcher is quietly the finest thing on his CV.
Movies (37)
- Gladiator (2000)
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
- Face/Off (1997)
- Braveheart (1995)
- The Game (1997)
- AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)
- Sin City (2005)
- Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003)
- Smokin' Aces (2006)
- Papillon (2017)
- Sleeping Dogs (2024)
- Boon (2022)
- The Saint (1997)
- When a Stranger Calls (2006)
- Code Name Banshee (2022)
- Sand Castle (2017)
- Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball (2010)
- Attila (2001)
- The Rising Hawk (2019)
- All About the Benjamins (2002)
- The Ballad of Lefty Brown (2017)
- Killers Anonymous (2019)
- Hero Wanted (2008)
- There Are No Saints (2022)
- The Wave (2019)
- Adolescence (2018)
- Plunkett & Macleane (1999)
- The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud (2020)
- Ratcatcher (1999)
- 40-Love (2021)
TV (7)
Where to start with Tommy Flanagan
If you have time for one thing, make it Sons of Anarchy. Chibs is the role the whole career pointed at, and Flanagan gives a biker soap opera an emotional centre it did not really deserve.
For films, Gladiator is the best use of his warmth, a servant part with about twelve lines that lands harder than most of the speeches, and Braveheart is where the face first got noticed. Ratcatcher is the outlier and the one cinephiles should seek out, an unglamorous Scottish drama where he plays a father with nothing heroic about him.
After that, work through the pulp: Sin City and Smokin' Aces use him exactly as intended, The Ballad of Lefty Brown gives him a rare sympathetic western role, and MobLand is the recent one worth your time.
The historical epics
Two of the biggest swords-and-sandals films of the era gave him a face the camera kept returning to, usually in the second rank behind the star. The later ones trade the budget for more screen time and rather less to do.
The long-form television
Seven seasons of Chibs made him a leading man on television at forty-three, which almost never happens to a character actor, and every ensemble drama since has hired him to be the most weathered person in the room.
The small films off the blockbuster path
Ratcatcher is the reason to look here: a Lynne Ramsay debut set on a Glasgow estate where he plays a father with nothing to hide behind. The rest are low-budget and uneven, and he is usually better than the film.