An open face, an honest manner and a habit of half-starving himself for a part: Jeremy Irvine plays earnest young men in period clothes who suffer, and does it decently. The trouble is that earnestness leaves an actor with little to do once the want has been said.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Albert Narracott teach a horse to plough in War Horse (2011). Jeremy Irvine stands in the Devon mud with the reins in his hands and every feeling on his face, and he means all of it. Albert wants the horse, has no doubts about the horse, and says so in his first scenes; the difficulty, as we said when we reviewed the film, is that there is then little left for him to play for the next two hours. We liked him at once and noticed, some way into France, that we had stopped thinking about him. Some of that is Lee Hall and Richard Curtis's script, which has everyone say exactly what they feel the moment they feel it. Some of it is Irvine, who plays sincerity with nothing behind it that the sincerity might be hiding.
He came to Spielberg from the National Youth Theatre and the RSC, where he had been in Dunsinane (2010), after two years of auditions and odd jobs that had nearly seen him give up. What he did next was the interesting part. He was offered big studio films and turned them down; as he told the Guardian in 2015, "I had this feeling after War Horse: everyone's going to think it was a fluke." So he went and did the work he thought would prove otherwise: Pip in Great Expectations (2012) opposite Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter, the romantic lead in the independent Now Is Good (2012), and the young Eric Lomax in The Railway Man (2013), sharing a character with Colin Firth and losing a frightening amount of weight to do it.
That preparation is the thing people know about him. He trains, rides, starves and does his own stunts, and it shows on screen; nobody could accuse him of coasting. It also points to the limit of the trade he has chosen. A body put through hardship is a fact the camera can record. What it cannot record is a thought the character is keeping to himself, and Irvine's parts, earnest young men in literary adaptations and wars, have rarely asked him for one. The pattern held through The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (2014), and it was a small relief to see him break it as the young Sam Carmichael in the second Mamma Mia film (2018), a part that required nothing of him but charm.
There has been television since, Treadstone (2019) among it, and Return to Silent Hill is due in 2026. He is still young enough for the interesting half of a career. What we would like to see, and have not yet, is a director who casts that honest face as a liar and lets us find out slowly.
Biography
Jeremy Irvine is an English actor. Born Jeremy William Fredric Smith on 18 June 1990 in Gamlingay, Cambridgeshire, he made his film debut as Albert Narracott in Steven Spielberg's War Horse (2011).
He trained for a year at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and appeared with the National Youth Theatre. Subsequent film roles include Adam in Now Is Good (2012), Philip "Pip" Pirrip in Great Expectations (2012), young Eric Lomax in The Railway Man (2013), young Sam in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018), and James Sunderland in Return to Silent Hill (2026). He has also appeared in the television series Treadstone (2019).
