Max Beesley

Watch Rob Lake in Bodies (2004) walk a ward beside a consultant he has begun to distrust, and notice what Beesley does not do. He does not square up. He does not make the speech the situation seems to invite. He keeps working, because that is what a junior doctor does, and the argument stays on his face rather than in his mouth. Jed Mercurio writes him a moral emergency and Beesley plays it as a job he still has to turn up for.

He came to acting from music, having spent the 1980s and 1990s as a session player touring and recording with Take That, George Michael, Jamiroquai and Paul Weller, and the musician's ear is the useful inheritance: he moves between Mancunian and other British dialects without visible effort. The breakthrough was the lead in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1997), followed by a run of feature films before 2004 that did him few favours. Then came Bodies (2004–2006), then Charlie Edwards in Hotel Babylon (2006–2009), a lighter berth, and after that a long stretch of recurring parts on both sides of the Atlantic: Mad Dogs, Survivors, Jamestown, Suits (2013), Homeland, The Outsider. By his own account the American years included a great many auditions and long spells without work. Hijack (2023) and The Gentlemen (2024), the second of two with Guy Ritchie, brought him back into view.

What works is the refusal to enlarge. In Bodies the ensemble, Patrick Baladi and Keith Allen among it, plays a ward of people obliged to keep working together, and Beesley's part is to be the one who cannot quite look away and cannot quite act either. We found it more distressing than a great deal of louder television, and the reason is his stillness: Lake watches, we watch him watching, and the consequences arrive anyway. He has said that method acting 'is not an excuse to be an arsehole', which is the sort of sentence you want from an actor and rarely get, and the performances bear it out. The emotion is chosen and then kept small.

The limit is the same quality. He is often cast as the authority figure in crime and thriller drama, and those parts ask him to be the threat. He is better at feeling pressure than at applying it, and in the wrong series he can recede into the fittings.

Start with Bodies, and stay for all of it. Two projects with Ritchie suggest where the next few years go; we would rather someone gave him another Mercurio.