Siôn Daniel Young

The scene of his we keep going back to in Lost Boys and Fairies (2024) is not in the club. Gabriel, the Cardiff singer he plays, sits at a kitchen table with his father Emrys, a farmer and chapelgoer played by William Thomas, and the two of them look at the table. Emrys speaks to his son in Welsh and has never managed the sentence Gabriel needs from him. Young waits for it. That scene moved us more than any of the songs, because nobody in it was trying to move us, and Young had the sense to let Thomas's hands and hat do most of the work.

That is the pattern. In the club he is loose and funny, singing in sequins at a place called Neverland; everywhere else he is wound tight. Daf James's script asks him to be a musical lead, an addict in recovery and a prospective father being questioned by a social worker, sometimes within a single scene, and he manages the changes without making a show of them. We thought the series piled on more sorrow than it could carry; we did not think that of him. Opposite Fra Fee, whose Andy does the accounts and the patience, Young is the one who gets to come apart, and he is careful not to enjoy it.

The career behind it is mostly hurt young men. He did early Welsh-language work in James's play Llwyth, then played Albert Narracott in War Horse at the National Theatre in 2013 and Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in the West End in 2015, both parts that wear a performer down by the interval. On screen there was Private Peaceful (2012), then the lead in The Left Behind (2019) as Gethin, in a drama about radicalisation, and Deceit (2021) as Colin Stagg, the real man at the centre of a miscarriage of justice. Critics tended to like him rather more than the productions around him. We have not reviewed those and will not judge them here, but the shape is plain. A smaller part as Douglas in the third series of Slow Horses (2023) and The Guest (2025) have followed.

"Gabe is really flawed. We don’t shy away from that. That’s the journey," he said of the part, and it is a fair account of what he does in general: he plays the flaw straight and leaves the forgiving to us. What we have not yet seen him do is relax. A decade of damaged men, played well, is a reputation, and it is also a rut. We would like to see him in a part where nothing much is wrong with the man, to find out what is left when the strain is taken away.