Jordan Gavaris

Felix Dawkins lives in a brick loft with a bathtub in the middle of it, paints, and tells the truth to a household of clones who would rather he did not. He also speaks with an English accent, which is the first thing to know about Jordan Gavaris, because Gavaris is from Caledon, Ontario, and Felix is not. He kept the voice up through whole filming days, and by his own account it helped: "When I lost the affectation after the read-through, Maria [Kennedy] was shocked. I think using an accent or affectation has given me a freedom as Felix I may not have otherwise found." That freedom is on the screen. Felix is looser, ruder and quicker than anyone around him, and he gets the best lines in a series that hands out a great many.

Before Orphan Black there were small Canadian jobs from 2008, the independent film 45 R.P.M. and episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation, then a lead in Unnatural History (2010), a live-action Cartoon Network series that first got him noticed. Then came five seasons of Orphan Black (2013–2017) opposite Tatiana Maslany, and it is that part he will be known for a while yet.

In our review we called Felix the only reliable moral sense in the cast, and it is more than a compliment to the writing. Maslany is playing several people at once; the series needs one fixed point, somebody who reacts to the latest revelation the way a sane person would, and Gavaris is it. We found ourselves waiting for the cuts back to that loft, especially in the later seasons when the conspiracy grew another head and we had stopped keeping notes, because Felix would look at the new development, say something unkind and accurate, and for a minute we knew where we were. He builds his characters physically, from animal-based exercises, and it shows: Felix does not move like anyone else in the frame.

The complaint is that the business has typed him. Flamboyant, witty, openly queer, the supporting friend who supplies the jokes and then the feeling: that is a description of Felix, and it has become a description of his casting. Film has offered him little, a supporting part as Eric in Gus Van Sant's The Sea of Trees (2015), alongside Matthew McConaughey, and not much else of note. Television has been kinder. He led The Lake (2022–2023) as Justin Lovejoy in a comedy-drama, and turned up as a guest in Hacks (2024) and in Orphan Black: Echoes (2024), which suggests the loft still has some pull. We have not reviewed those, so we will not judge them.

What he has not had is a lead on the big screen in his own voice, or a part where the wit is not the point. He has shown he can wear someone else's accent for five years; someone should let him keep his own for two hours. Until then, Orphan Black is worth the evening for him as well as for Maslany, which is not a small thing to say of a series built entirely around her.