Dylan Thomas Smith

Reece in G'wed is the loudest person in every room, and Dylan Thomas Smith plays him as a boy who knows exactly why. If he keeps talking, nobody gets to ask him a question. Smith lets you see him make that calculation, usually a half-second before he opens his mouth, and it is the thing that separates the performance from the character as written. On the page Reece is a scally and a ringleader; on the screen he is a scally and a ringleader who is slightly afraid of silence.

He came to it slowly for someone so young. Smith is from Birkenhead, which is where the accent comes from and why he never has to think about it, and he started at about twelve with drama classes, Rare Studios in Liverpool and a bus advertisement. Then six years of auditions and not much else, until Danny Kenny cast him as the lead in G'wed (2024). The same year he turned up in a small part across three episodes of The Gathering. Since then it has all been Reece, across three series so far, under Akaash Meeda for the first and Chloe English for the two after.

We liked him more than we liked the series around him, which we found decent and tiring in roughly equal measure. He is best with Jake Kenny-Byrne's Christopher and Malek Alkoni's Ziad, when the three talk across each other in half-sentences and the scripts resist adding a punchline, and he is at his most interesting in the few scenes where Reece goes quiet, usually over grief, and Smith lets the face do what the mouth has been covering for. Those scenes are rare, which is a complaint about the writing and not about him.

The writing is also where the caution lies. Kenny has given Reece more and more of the talking as the series have gone on, and in later episodes the character is handed speeches that sound less like a schoolboy and more like a writer's idea of one, delivered to friends who have been given less to do. Smith can sell most of it, because he is quick and likeable and never visibly reaching, but a performance built on volume will not survive a second part written the same way.

So the question is the one every young actor with a hit gets asked, and for once it is the right one. He has shown he can be loud with intelligence. We would like to see him be quiet for a director who did not create him.