Michael Dorman plays men who are good company and bad news, grinning through the drink and the trouble, and he will change his own body to show where the grinning leads. Given a long-running part, he is worth watching closely.
Fi1m perspective
Michael Dorman's Gordo Stevens in For All Mankind (2019) is the man at the party you would rather sit next to, and the one you would not lend your car to. He drinks, he grins, and from early on it is plain he is heading somewhere bad. Dorman does not signal the fall. He lets the charm run and trusts us to see what it is costing, and next to Joel Kinnaman's Ed Baldwin, who cannot say what he feels and so says something rude instead, Gordo is the one who says plenty and means less of it.
That is the Dorman part, more or less: the flawed, likeable man with something sad underneath, played for comedy and for hurt in the same breath. He built it in Australia first, on television in The Secret Life of Us (2002) and in Suburban Mayhem (2006), the film that got him noticed, then as a lead in Wonderland (2013). The Water Diviner (2014) put him alongside Russell Crowe, and he went to America, where Patriot (2015) gave him John Tavner in a dark comedy-drama and the part that made his name outside Australia. For All Mankind followed, then the title role in Joe Pickett (2021), then home for Territory (2024) and Treasure & Dirt (2026).
What he does well is commit for the long haul. Television gives an actor years with a character, and Dorman uses them: between seasons of For All Mankind he put on a good deal of weight so that Gordo would come back a changed man, and we were more unsettled by it than we expected to be. The grin was the same. Everything around it had slackened, and nobody needed to tell us what the years had done. It is the kind of choice that only pays off if the performance underneath has been honest all along, and his had.
The limit is that his shows have not always held their tone as steadily as he holds his. Patriot was liked for him and faulted for a quirkiness some found hard to sustain, and in For All Mankind the best writing went to the women's programme while Gordo drank at the edge of the frame. He is a second lead by temperament, and in both shows the story spent a good deal of its time looking at someone else.
He has said he can "lull into a space of comfort at times, as we all do," and that he went looking for people who wanted to do something different. The thing to watch for next is whether the grin comes off entirely.
Biography
Michael Dorman is a New Zealand-born Australian actor. Born in Auckland on 26 April 1981, he moved to Australia with his family at the age of ten and later studied drama at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.
He began his career in the Australian series The Secret Life of Us (2002–2005). Dorman is known for his starring roles as Tom Wilcox in Wonderland (2013–2015), John Tavner in Patriot (2015–2018), NASA astronaut Gordo Stevens in For All Mankind (2019–), and the title character in Joe Pickett (2021–2023). His film work includes Triangle (2009), The Water Diviner (2014) and The Invisible Man (2020).
