Jason Merrells plays the decent man in the way: the fiancé, the headteacher, the one being lied to or leaned on. He keeps that man sympathetic when the script would make him a fool, which is a rarer skill than it sounds.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Gavin Ferraday in the first hour of Cutting It (2002). A rival salon has opened across the street, his fiancée has a history with the man who runs it, and Gavin is the only person at the table who does not know. Jason Merrells plays him without a flicker of suspicion and without a flicker of stupidity either, which is the trick. A lesser actor makes the man who is being lied to into a joke. Merrells makes him someone you would rather the lie were not told to.
That is the part he has been given, in one coat or another, ever since. Debbie Horsfield's series ran for four series and twenty-five episodes and it was his breakthrough. Before it came three years as Matt Hawley in Casualty (1994), Phil Delaney in Queer as Folk (1999) and Martin Leach in Paul Abbott's Clocking Off (2000), an ensemble we rated highly without singling him out. After it came the long leads: Jack Rimmer, the headteacher in Waterloo Road (2006), and four years as Declan Macey in Emmerdale (2010). Later there were recurring parts in Agatha Raisin (2016) and Happy Valley (2023), and he went back to Jack Rimmer in 2025. The common thread is the capable professional man, the one other people lean on, who then has a crisis of his own.
What he does with that man is hold him steady over years, which is not nothing. Television that runs this long tends to wear its decent characters down to a shrug, and Horsfield's script asked Gavin to be a fool more than once. We found ourselves on his side anyway, and it was the way Merrells plays the salon scenes, a man working out what is going on a beat too late and minding more than he says, that did it. Sarah Parish, who held Cutting It together, is the actor he plays off best; the two have worked together twice.
The limit comes with the territory. When the writing pushes him towards villainy, as Emmerdale did with Declan, the stories get heightened in the way soap stories do, and the steadiness that serves him as the straight man has less to push against. We have not reviewed that run and will not judge it here. He also directs short films, and he has said that theatre is the actor's medium and that filming "can be quite soporific", with a lot of waiting in the trailer. On screen the waiting has mostly been worth it. If you want to see what he is for, start with Cutting It and watch the man who does not know.
Biography
Jason Merrells is an English actor. He studied at Chichester University and made his screen debut in the 1994 film To Die For.
He is known for his television roles as Matt Hawley in Casualty (1994–1997), Phil Delaney in Queer as Folk (1999), Martin Leach in Clocking Off (2000–2001), Gavin Ferraday in Cutting It (2002–2005), Jack Rimmer in Waterloo Road (2006–2008) and Declan Macey in Emmerdale (2010–2014). He has also appeared in A Touch of Frost, Death in Paradise and as Sir Charles Fraith in Agatha Raisin (from 2016). His brother Simon Merrells is also an actor.
