Edward Holcroft is the actor casting directors reach for when a well-born young man needs to be hard to read, and in London Spy he showed that the trick works best when the blankness turns out to be fear.
Fi1m perspective
A runner stops by the Thames at dawn and speaks to a stranger, and the odd thing is that he seems to be speaking for the first time. That is Alex in London Spy (2015), and it is the Edward Holcroft performance we know best: a handsome, well-spoken young man who behaves as if he has learned conversation from a manual. He asks before he touches Ben Whishaw's hand. He asks again before anything more. Holcroft is on screen for far less of the five hours than the billing suggests, and he makes the absence work for him, because the little he does is so contained that we spend the rest of the series wondering what it was covering.
2015 was the year he arrived, and he arrived three times at once: as Charlie Hesketh in Kingsman: The Secret Service, as George Boleyn in Wolf Hall opposite Mark Rylance, and as Alex. The parts have a family resemblance. Since then he has been Dr Simon Jordan in Alias Grace (2017), Charlie Hesketh again in Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017), and a presence in Gunpowder (2017), The English Game (2020), The Undeclared War (2022) and The Agency (2024), twice alongside Charlotte Rampling. That is a lot of costume and a lot of espionage, and the men he plays are nearly always privileged and nearly always keeping something back.
What he does well is withhold. Trained on stage at Drama Centre London, he has the discipline to do almost nothing for a long time and let the camera decide what it means, and in Laurie Rose's long, patient frames on London Spy that is exactly the right instinct. We found him more frightening in the first two hours, saying nothing wrong, than the series managed to be later once it started explaining itself; a man who checks every sentence before he lets it out is a man with something to check. He made stillness look like fear, and we believed the fear before we knew what it was for.
The risk of the method is that it becomes the whole act. The parts have stayed posh, guarded and adjacent to a secret service, and we have begun to wonder whether anyone has asked him to be warm, or foolish, or loud. He has said himself that "There is still a lot to learn on camera that I haven’t learned yet. I would like to keep exploring." We would like that too. The quiet is a real gift; the next thing worth watching is whether he can be persuaded to break it.
Biography
Edward Holcroft is an English actor known for work in film, television and theatre. He was born on 23 June 1987 in London.
He studied at Oxford Brookes University before training at the Drama Centre London, part of Central Saint Martins, graduating in 2012. His screen roles include Charlie Hesketh in the Kingsman films (2015 and 2017), George Boleyn in Wolf Hall (2015), Alex in London Spy (2015), and Dr Simon Jordan in Alias Grace (2017). Stage credits include appearances in Jerusalem at the Royal Court Theatre and Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Donmar Warehouse.
