Jack Roth

In The Great Train Robbery (2013), Jack Roth’s Charlie Wilson belongs in the company around him. Alongside Paul Anderson as Gordon Goody and Neil Maskell as Buster Edwards, he helps make the gang feel like people who know one another, with something to sustain their acquaintance beyond the job. We enjoyed their company more than we expected, because the attention to how they relate to one another drew us in. Roth’s contribution is persuasive, and worth noticing even when the pleasure comes from watching the group.

There is a reservation about how effectively that works. Chris Chibnall’s writing gives the gang’s relationships more attention than the moral questions, and persuasive actors make that imbalance easier to accept. Luke Evans’s Bruce Reynolds holds our attention without swallowing the ensemble, leaving Roth and the others room to establish why these men might want to be together. It is good supporting work in an absorbing crime drama, though we would not use it as proof that Roth can carry a film on his own.

His earlier television work placed him in period drama as Dolge Orlick in Great Expectations (2011), with The Great Train Robbery bringing wider attention. Supporting film parts followed, including Wolf in Martin Koolhoven’s Western Brimstone (2016) and Lieutenant Adema in Gareth Edwards’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). Joe Martin’s Us and Them (2017) offered a different test: the lead role of Danny in a contemporary class-revenge thriller. For an actor frequently cast as criminals, rebels and men on the margins, that was a chance to take more responsibility for keeping us watching.

Roth has put his preference plainly: “I don’t want to look cool on screen. I want to be the character.” We would like to see that tested with more leading parts, without pretending that the size of a role decides how well it has been played. Start with The Great Train Robbery, provided you can accept a drama rather fonder of its robbers than we think it should be.