Jon Pointing is good at playing men whose cheerfulness takes effort. His comedy gives the familiar lad some dignity; the danger is being hired to play the cheeky friend again, without enough else to do.
Fi1m perspective
Jon Pointing’s Danny in Big Boys (2022–2025) keeps the cheerfulness going a little harder than he needs to. Pointing uses physical comedy to make that effort funny, while letting us recognise the unhappiness it conceals. He had already played Charlie South in Pls Like (2017–2021) and Jason in Plebs (2018–2022), but Danny made the familiar laddish manner worth closer attention. The performance gives the goofiness and the distress equal care. We rate him most when the writing gives him something to protect with all that good humour.
Small Prophets (2026), in which he plays Clive, offers a sympathetic setting for that sort of actor. Mackenzie Crook lets people be peculiar and disappointed without making either quality their only interest, and Pearce Quigley and Lauren Patel give the comedy its unforced warmth. We were moved by its treatment of grief: the characters can be sad and still be funny, peculiar people worth spending time with. It is the kind of company we want to see Pointing keep. The reservation is Crook’s fondness for everybody’s oddities: there are moments when a little less indulgence would help.
The move into thrillers is less conclusive. He plays Ash in Run Away (2026), a series kept involving by James Nesbitt even as its twists grow difficult to believe. Family secrets give the mystery weight, but the melodramatic handling and clichéd dialogue make it a qualified recommendation for thriller enthusiasts. A change of genre can offer a familiar comic actor different work, but it cannot make clichéd lines sound convincing. We would not take this programme as evidence that Pointing needs to leave comedy behind.
The more pressing risk is repetition within comedy: another cheeky friend, another version of the same part. Danny shows how much Pointing can find within that familiar character, and the concern about typecasting is that subsequent roles may ask him to repeat the manner without giving him as much to play. That is a reason to want more demanding writing for him, rather than simply more sombre work. We would be disappointed if the next script asked him only to be cheerful.
Biography
Jon Pointing, also credited as Jonathan Pointing, is a British actor, writer and comedian. He trained at the University of Winchester and began appearing in television in the early 2010s.
He is known for his role as Jason in the ITV2 sitcom Plebs (2013–2022) and as Danny in the Channel 4 series Big Boys (2022–2025), for which he received British Academy Television Award nominations. Other credits include Pls Like (2017–2021), Starstruck (2021) as Dan, Smothered (2023), Sweetpea (2024) as Craig, Queenie (2024) as Tom Blake, and Murder Is Easy (2023) as Rivers. In 2026 he appeared as Clive in the BBC series Small Prophets and as Ash in the Netflix series Run Away.
