Paul Chahidi

In Wicked Little Letters (2024), Paul Chahidi’s Constable Spedding is a bully who outranks Anjana Vasan’s Gladys Moss. Hugh Skinner’s Constable Papperwick outranks her too, despite being a fool. We were irritated on Moss’s behalf: she is doing the thinking while these two retain the authority. Chahidi has the less rewarding job here, giving Vasan something to push against rather than having the comic centre of the scene to himself. He is useful to Thea Sharrock’s film, but it is a narrow use of him.

The warmer comic actor is there in This Country (2017–2020), as the kindly Rev. Francis Seaton. Chahidi’s grounded supporting work gives us a reason to care about someone who is not driving the story, rather than simply waiting for the next joke. We rate that ability to make a decent man worth watching; beside Spedding, Seaton is a reminder that Chahidi need not play the person everyone else would prefer to avoid.

His theatre work helps explain the comic assurance. In the 2013 all-male production of Twelfth Night at Shakespeare’s Globe and on Broadway, he played Maria opposite Mark Rylance, drawing on the classical technique developed through his work at the Globe and the RSC. His screen career reaches back to supporting parts in the late 1990s and includes Nikolai Bulganin in Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin (2017). That is a career built substantially around working with other actors, and his warmth and timing are useful qualities in an ensemble.

In Wicked Little Letters, the limitation is partly the writing. Sharrock has a strong cast, but the swearing wears thin and the mystery is too easy; Chahidi’s contribution cannot mend those larger faults. Ben Davis shoots the police station in weak-tea colours, which suit the dispiriting treatment Moss receives there. We would welcome more parts that let Chahidi be as interesting as the people he supports. Start with This Country if Spedding is all you have seen of him.