Freddie Fox

Freddie Fox’s Ian Fleming hovers at the edge of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024), there for the pleasure of recognising the name. Guy Ritchie gives him a knowing cameo, with little interest in what he might actually say. We grew bored as the killings kept supplying the jokes and the dialogue returned to logistics. The action is clean and the company agreeable, but Fox cannot do much with a part that chiefly asks him to be noticed. We cannot fairly ask him to fix a script that gives him so little to work with.

His early screen work suggests a less narrow actor than the upper-class casting might imply. He played the singer Marilyn in Worried About the Boy (2010), before James Leighton-Masters, the outgoing president of an elite Oxford club, in The Riot Club (2014). The latter fits the familiar casting: privilege with an arrogant or decadent edge. That can be useful, but it becomes limiting when a film expects the type to do all the work.

Pride (2014), with Fox as Jeff, is the much better film. Matthew Warchus makes its characters worth caring about, and the cast earns most of the uplift. The story tidies away some difficulties too readily, but the warmth and humour survive that tidiness. Fox has a supporting part, and there is no need to pretend the ensemble’s achievement belongs to him alone. We recommend it for the company, with the caveat that it offers only a limited view of him.

Television offers more substantial parts, including Freddie Baxter in Russell T Davies’s Cucumber (2015) and Jeremy Bamber in White House Farm (2020). The chilling quality of the latter is evidence that Fox has uses beyond another privileged young man behaving badly. Spider Webb in Slow Horses (2022) is a recurring role rather than a passing appearance. We would like writers to give him more of that space and less reliance on the familiar type. Try Cucumber for a part that gives him more to do.