Adrian Scarborough
Adrian Scarborough is an actor, born 1968.
Scarborough is the sort of British actor whose face carries a dozen half-memories: the man behind the desk, the man with the clipboard, the man who says the one line that changes the scene. Born in Leicestershire in 1968, he has been working in prestige film and television for three decades without ever becoming a name above the title.
His speciality is the fussy, capable functionary with a real interior life. Frank in Vera Drake, Barnes in Gosford Park, Wilkes in The History Boys, the BBC radio announcer in The King's Speech, Toothman in Les Miserables and Major Hepburn in 1917 are all small roles, and he plays them as men with a full working day behind them rather than as scenery. It is the least showy skill in the business and directors keep hiring him for it.
Television has given him more room. Raymond in Killing Eve is genuinely unsettling, Mr Jolly in Psychoville is grotesque comedy played with total commitment, and Claudius in Plebs shows he is happy to be silly. He has been in Cranford, Upstairs Downstairs, The Paradise, Crashing and Gavin and Stacey, and since 2022 he has led The Chelsea Detective as DI Max Arnold, which is one of the few times a series has been built around him. It suits him.
Movies (26)
- 1917 (2019)
- Les Misérables (2012)
- The King's Speech (2010)
- Christopher Robin (2018)
- Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)
- National Theatre Live: The Habit of Art (2010)
- Notes on a Scandal (2006)
- A Little Chaos (2015)
- Artemis Fowl (2020)
- Gosford Park (2001)
- Dirty Pretty Things (2002)
- Patrick (2018)
- The Madness of King George (1994)
- Vera Drake (2004)
- In the Bleak Midwinter (1995)
- On Chesil Beach (2018)
- To Kill a King (2003)
- The History Boys (2006)
- Gavin & Stacey: A Fond Farewell (2025)
- Into the Storm (2009)
- Bright Young Things (2003)
- The Last Vermeer (2019)
- Last Resort (2000)
- Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998)
- The Revengers' Comedies (1998)
- St. Ives (1998)
TV (17)
- Midsomer Murders (1997)
- Killing Eve (2018)
- The Chelsea Detective (2022)
- Plebs (2013)
- Cranford (2007)
- Miranda (2009)
- Gavin & Stacey (2007)
- The Paradise (2012)
- Psychoville (2009)
- A Dance to the Music of Time (1997)
- Little Women (2017)
- Crashing (2016)
- Upstairs Downstairs (2010)
- Murder, They Hope (2021)
- Saxondale (2006)
- Blunt Talk (2015)
- Restless (2012)
Where to start with Adrian Scarborough
The performance to see first is Vera Drake. It is the one that shows what he does when a film gives him a real family to belong to, and the whole ensemble works at a level British cinema rarely reaches.
Then Gosford Park and The History Boys for the two great ensembles he slots into invisibly, and 1917 and The King's Speech for the single-scene appearances that show how much he can do with almost nothing.
For television, Killing Eve gives him the most memorable character of his career in very little screen time, Psychoville is the strangest thing on this list by a distance, and The Chelsea Detective is the comfortable Sunday-evening series where he finally gets to be the lead.