Gareth David-Lloyd's trade is the quiet man at the edge of the frame who turns out to matter most. As Ianto Jones in Torchwood he was handed the programme's best arc and played it without raising his voice; nothing since has asked as much of him.
Fi1m perspective
Ianto Jones brings the coffee. For most of the first series of Torchwood (2006) that is the job, and Gareth David-Lloyd plays it straight: suit, tray, a dry line if anyone is listening, then back to the archive. It would be easy to miss him. That is the trick. By the third series, five episodes as bleak as anything British television has managed, he has the best arc in the programme, and it was built by degrees out of exactly that reticence.
He came to the part by way of Russell T Davies, who had written him a smaller Jones, Yanto, in Mine All Mine (2004), and the Torchwood casting followed from it. He has said of the first Ianto-centred episode that it was "the first episode I got to sort of drive and I wasn't expecting it at all", which is more or less how the character experiences his own promotion. Alongside John Barrowman's Jack Harkness, who does everything at full volume and, when asked for grief, goes still in a way that reads as waiting for a cue, David-Lloyd's stillness is the real thing. He lets a look do the work of a speech and then declines to make the speech. They have been cast together three times, and the pairing works because one of them is always underplaying.
We had expected to spend Torchwood watching the greatcoat. Instead, by the third series, the person we were frightened for was the man with the tea tray, and we were surprised at how much that mattered. The credit is partly the writing, which gives Ianto a little more to carry each year, and partly David-Lloyd's refusal to signal any of it in advance.
The career since has been steady and, by his own choice or the industry's, narrow. Recurring parts in Holby City and Casualty; Macheath in The Threepenny Opera and Sebastian in Twelfth Night on stage; a major voice role as Solas in Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014), reprised in later entries; a credit in The Witcher. Since 2015 he has played Ianto again in Big Finish's Torchwood audio dramas and written scripts for them, so the character has now lived longer on tape than he did on screen. It is a small portfolio for a man who did the hardest thing in ensemble drama, which is to become indispensable without anyone noticing when it happened.
He is good at waiting. Someone should stop making him do it.
Biography
Gareth David-Lloyd is a Welsh actor, writer and singer. He was born on 28 March 1981 in Bettws, Newport, Wales, and studied performing arts at Crosskeys College.
He is best known for playing Ianto Jones in the science fiction series Torchwood (2006–2009) and reprised the role in Doctor Who (2008) and later audio dramas. Other television and film credits include appearances in Warehouse 13 (2011), Sherlock Holmes (2010) and The Witcher (2019), as well as voice work as Solas in the Dragon Age video games.
