Daniel Ings

Watch Daniel Ings wait for a laugh. He lets a pause run a beat longer than is comfortable, the eyebrows go up, and then comes the grin, the wide guilty one of a man who knows what he has done and hopes you will find it funny too. It is a comedian's kit and he is honest about it: "I'm kind of a comedy hack really," he said in an interview about The Gentlemen. The trick is that the grin is never quite adult. Somewhere behind it there is a boy who expected to be caught.

That boy is his whole career. He came up in British comedy, small parts in Peep Show, Psychoville and The Café, before Lovesick (2014) made him Luke Curran, a womaniser the audience was invited to forgive every week and did. The Crown (2016) cast him as Commander Mike Parker, the friend who leads Prince Philip astray, and the mould was set: well-spoken, well-dressed, not to be trusted with your sister. I Hate Suzie (2020) was the exception, Cob Betterton, a husband curdled with resentment opposite Billie Piper, and it is the part critics reach for when they want to argue he can do more than charm. Guy Ritchie then gave him the lead in The Gentlemen (2024), Freddy Horniman, an aristocrat who cannot be left alone with anything, and Ings played him at full volume, improvising where Ritchie lets actors improvise. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2026) handed him Ser Lyonel Baratheon, a lord written to be loud.

What he does, and what other actors of his type do not, is refuse the sneer. Ings has said he goes looking for the child in the villains he is offered, and the people who watched Freddy Horniman wreck one room after another came away fond of him. The cost is that television has noticed and now orders the same dish every time. He has said himself that the posh cad can feel limiting, and from the outside the limit is plain. Too many of the parts are a man in a good jacket who cannot keep his hands to himself.

Kill Jackie (2026) is what happens when the grin is confiscated. Ings plays Sam, Jackie's friend and lawyer, buttoned up and sorry about it, and he spends eight hours apologising, mostly to Catherine Zeta-Jones and occasionally to us. We felt for him. Deprived of the pause and the eyebrows he has nothing to do except look worried, and looking worried for eight hours is not a performance. It is not his fault; the series did not know what it wanted from anyone.

He has Star Wars: Starfighter and an adaptation of Prima Facie on the way. The thing to watch is not whether he can be funny, which is settled. It is what he does the next time nobody writes him a grin.