Tom Rosenthal plays the younger brother who gets the salt in first: quick, gleeful, twelve years old in a grown man's clothes. Six series of Friday Night Dinner proved he can do it well and left open the question of what else he can do.
Fi1m perspective
Jonny Goodman comes through his parents' front door on a Friday with a job and a flat and a life, and none of it survives the sight of his brother. Rosenthal plays him as the sharper of the two, the one who has the salt in Adam's water before the plates are down, and the pleasure of the performance is how little he hides the pleasure. He watches. He waits for the glass to be lifted. Robert Popper wrote all thirty-six episodes of Friday Night Dinner (2011) and gave Jonny the same move in most of them, and Rosenthal never once plays it tired.
He came to it from stand-up, which he had been doing since the late 2000s, and the sitcom made him. Plebs (2013) followed almost at once, another lead in another ensemble comedy, as Marcus, and for the better part of a decade he was carrying two series at the same time, both of them casting him as the mischievous or hapless young man. There was a supporting part in Bridget Jones's Baby (2016), as a researcher called Josh, and there were the stage shows, Child of Privilege (2011) and Manhood (2019), the second built around a subject most comics would not touch. We have not seen them and will not pretend to a view.
What we can speak to is the table. Friday Night Dinner is a five-hander and Rosenthal's timing lives or dies on the other four. Simon Bird plays Adam as the put-upon boy from The Inbetweeners grown older and no wiser, and Rosenthal's job is to be the pressure on him, the reason the war never ends, so that Paul Ritter's shirtless bafflement and Tamsin Greig's ruined dinners have something to be baffled and ruined by. We laughed, more than the joke deserved, every time the salt went in, and what did it was Rosenthal's face, which is entirely serious about the business of getting his brother. There is no wink to the camera. There is a man watching a glass.
The cost of doing one thing well for that long is that people stop being able to see you do anything else. Two sitcoms, two prank-prone younger men, and an audience that arrives at a comedy club expecting Jonny. He has said as much: "I felt like every time I stepped on stage I was responsible for Friday Night Dinner and Plebs." He stopped touring for a while and came back in 2025 with a show about exactly that, which is either a way out of the problem or a way of making a living from it.
He has been the brother who plays the trick for fourteen years. Somebody should let him be the one who gets caught.
Biography
Tom Rosenthal is an English actor, comedian and writer. Born on 14 January 1988 in Hammersmith, London, he is the son of television sports presenter Jim Rosenthal. He studied philosophy at King's College London.
He is best known for playing Jonny Goodman in the Channel 4 sitcom Friday Night Dinner (2011–2020) and Marcus in the ITV sitcom Plebs (2013–2022). His other television credits include Broadchurch (2013), Horrible Histories (2009) and voice work in Thunderbirds Are Go! (2015). Film roles include Bridget Jones's Baby (2016) and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023). He has written and performed stand-up shows including Child of Privilege (2011), благодаря (2013) and Manhood (2019–2020).
