Christian Cooke

There is a suit in Cemetery Junction (2010) that sits on Christian Cooke a shade too large, and it does more work than most of the dialogue. Ruth Myers cut it that way, as she should have. Cooke plays Freddie Taylor, a Reading lad who has bought the suit before he has any idea what to do in it, and he plays the gap: shoulders the jacket has not settled on, a walk that cannot decide between pride and embarrassment. It is a small, exact piece of acting, and it is the thing we would point to if asked what he does.

He had been working a long time before anyone in a cinema saw him. He started as a child, with a commercial and stage work at around ten, and spent six years as Luke Kirkwall in Where the Heart Is (2000–2006). His own account of those years is unsentimental: "it was just about working and doing whatever came my way." Demons and Trinity followed, then Gervais and Merchant gave him the lead and the suit. After that the parts got heavier quickly: a young paratrooper in 1940s Palestine for Peter Kosminsky in The Promise (2011), 1950s Miami in Magic City (2012–13), Mercutio in Romeo & Juliet (2013).

Since then he has done what steady British actors do. Miniseries (Stonemouth, Ordeal by Innocence, Barkskins, That Dirty Black Bag), films (Love, Rosie in 2014, Point Blank, Plainclothes in 2025), theatre, and directing, first shorts and then a feature, Embers. The recent one that interests us is Rematch (2024), in which he plays Garry Kasparov across the board from IBM's Deep Blue. We have not reviewed it and will not pretend to.

The honest thing to say about Cemetery Junction is this. We liked Cooke in it, and about an hour in we realised the scene we would carry home belonged to Tom Hughes and Francis Magee in a kitchen, not to Freddie at all. Cooke is the film's centre and its still point, and the heat keeps going to the edges: to Hughes's swagger collapsing in front of his father, to Jack Doolan saying the wrong sentence to another girl, to Felicity Jones being bored by the man she is about to marry. That is partly the script, which gives Freddie the journey and everyone else the moments. It is partly a quality in Cooke, who is good at wanting and less obviously good at letting go.

Which may be why the real people suit him. A young soldier and a chess champion are both men who have to hold still while something enormous happens to them, and holding still is what he does well. Start with Cemetery Junction, since it is the one we have reviewed, and watch the suit. By now, presumably, it fits. We would like to see a film that asks whether that was good for him.