Philippe Duclos

Watch what Philippe Duclos does when someone lies to him. As Judge François Roban in Spiral, the investigating magistrate at the centre of eight series of French police and courtroom drama, he does not raise his voice or lean in. He takes his glasses off, or leaves them on, and waits, and the liar fills the silence. We called him a tired schoolmaster with the tenacity of a terrier when we reviewed the series, and we stand by both halves. His scenes were quieter than anyone else's in a loud programme and we leaned forward for every one of them, because Duclos gave the impression that the case was being decided in his head and nowhere else.

The role came late. Duclos began in theatre in the early 1970s, much of it classical work with the director Daniel Mesguich, and did not reach cinema until the early 1990s, in supporting parts for Arnaud Desplechin, Patrice Chéreau and Bertrand Tavernier. He is Telligny in Chéreau's La Reine Margot (1994), Caron in Jacques Audiard's Un héros très discret (1996), and a voice in Alain Corneau's Tous les matins du monde (1991). Then, in 2005, at nearly sixty, he put on Roban's robes and kept them on until 2019. Wide recognition arrived with the judge, and not before.

Casting directors have a type for him: judges, inspectors, priests, headmasters, doctors, men whose authority comes with a desk and a careful way of speaking. He speaks precisely and gives little away, which is why the small shifts register when they come. What made Roban more than a type was time. Fifteen years of the same part let Duclos age with the character and let the character's fragility show in stages, so that the intransigent judge of the first run and the more exposed man of the later ones are plainly the same person. He described the part in 2014 as one of "intelligence, intransigeance, fragilité, réserve, une certaine forme de sadisme, de masochisme aussi, mais également un humour grinçant", and the list is accurate; the last three items are the ones a lesser actor would have left out. The series made him its moral centre and knew it.

The reservation is the obvious one. A man cast this often as the voice of an institution risks becoming part of the set, and his cinema has been supporting parts; we have not reviewed those films and will not pretend to a view of them. The series is another matter. Our score of 86 for Spiral owes a good deal to Caroline Proust's Laure Berthaud, and a good deal to him. He has since taken another recurring part, Pierre Chassagne in L'Art du crime, from 2017. Whether it lets him do anything Roban did not, we cannot yet say. Start with the judge.