Christos Stergioglou plays fathers, and he plays them from the inside: quiet, certain, watching. The same stillness that made him frightening for Yorgos Lanthimos made him, to our surprise, the warmest thing in a British sitcom about a hopeless lettings agent.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Christos Stergioglou does when everyone else in the scene is being ridiculous. Very little. In Stath Lets Flats (2018) his son, Jamie Demetriou's lettings agent, is making a fool of himself in the foreground, and Vasos sits, and looks, and lets his face do the small amount of work required. Our review called him the still centre of that show, a father who loves his children and knows exactly what they are, and the second half of the sentence is where the comedy lives. Most sitcom parents are fools or scolds. Vasos has counted his children's faults, accepted every one and gone on loving them, and Stergioglou plays that arithmetic without a single line about it.
British viewers met him there. Greek ones had known him since 1981, on stage and on screen, and the part that carried his name abroad was the father in Yorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth (2009), a controlling patriarch played without a trace of the villain. We have not reviewed it, so we will say only that it is plainly the same instrument tuned the other way: the certainty that is comforting in Vasos is, in that house, the thing you cannot get out from under. Around it sit the roles his reputation at home rests on, Hard Goodbyes: My Father (2002), Unfair World (2011) and the title part in The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas (2013), along with two films for the director Elina Psikou. The pattern holds. Fathers, men in charge, men whose motives you read off their faces because the script declines to hand them over.
We went to Stath Lets Flats for Demetriou and laughed, as promised, until it hurt. What we did not expect was to be moved, a little, by the father, and it was the looking that did it: pride and worry arriving in the same glance, neither one winning, and no attempt to tell us which he felt more. It is a small part in a very silly programme and it is the one we found ourselves thinking about afterwards.
The caveat is that we have seen him do one thing superbly and not much else. An actor this still is easy for a director to treat as furniture, and the sitcom, for all its affection, mostly needs him to sit there being sane. Whether there is a loud Stergioglou, or a foolish one, we cannot tell you. Start with Stath Lets Flats, then go to Dogtooth, and in both cases keep your eyes on the father rather than the children. He will not be doing much. That is the point.
Biography
Christos Stergioglou is a Greek actor. Born on 5 February 1952 in Didymoteicho, he studied at the State Conservatory of Thessaloniki and the HB Studio in New York.
He is known for his leading role as the father in Dogtooth (2009). Other credits include Adults in the Room (2019) as Sakis and the British sitcom Stath Lets Flats (2018–2021) as Vasos Charalambos. He won the Best Actor award at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in 2002 for performances in Hard Goodbyes: My Father and Tha to metanioseis.
