Olly Alexander

Ritchie Tozer gets to London at eighteen, tells his family he is reading law, and switches to drama the moment their backs are turned. Olly Alexander plays him in It's a Sin (2021) as a boy who has decided to be delightful and mostly manages it. The vanity is written in and Alexander does not hide it. He treats every room as an audition he expects to pass. It is a performance about wanting to be looked at, given by someone who has spent a decade being looked at for a living.

That decade is the odd shape of the career. Alexander began acting in the late 2000s, in Summerhill (2008), as Tom Keats in Jane Campion's Bright Star (2009) and in Skins, having left Hereford College of Arts once an agent took him on at sixteen. Then in 2010 he became the singer in Years & Years, and the band took most of the next fourteen years, until it wound up in 2024. Film happened in the gaps: God Help the Girl (2014), for which he also wrote songs, and The Riot Club (2014), as Toby Maitland among the Oxford dining-club boys. None of these made him an actor people talked about. It's a Sin did.

Russell T Davies gets the best out of him, partly by writing to the pop star as much as to the actor. Ritchie is fluent, quick and pleased with himself, and Alexander softens none of it. We spent the first episode faintly irritated by him, which is what Davies intends, and by the third we minded what happened to him, which is the achievement; Alexander never asks for our sympathy, and Ritchie is not the sort of boy who would notice he needed it. What he cannot do is out-act the flat. Omari Douglas has the jokes, Lydia West has the worry, and Callum Scott Howells, saying almost nothing as Colin, ends up with the centre of the thing. Alexander is the lead and not the performance we remember first. That is partly how the piece is built, since Ritchie is there to be watched while Colin does the watching, but it also tells you what Alexander is good at. He is at his best when the character is performing; when the performance drops, he is one good actor among several.

Critics have had nothing bad to say about him, which is easy when there is one major part to judge. The honest reservation is that there has been only one, and the music is the reason. He has since gone into theatre, including the West End, and carries on releasing records on his own. Alexander said of Ritchie that "some actors would wait their entire careers and not get such a good role." He was right, and this one was handed to him. The next will have to be found.