Ben Batt
Ben Batt is an actor, born 1986.
Channel 4 gave him the credit that still leads the page. Batt, from Wigan, played Joe Pritchard in Shameless, and British television has been casting him off that ever since: hard northern men who turn out to have more going on than the brief required.
The pattern is easy to trace. DC Kevin Lumb in Scott & Bailey, Alf Rutter in The Village, Craig Scruton the fireman in Sirens, and John Anderson, the antagonist of Weekender (2011), a film set in late-1980s rave culture that gave him the meanest part of the lot. He has also done the two things that keep an actor like this employed: period drama and comedy. Agrippa in Domina, Spartacus in Barbarians Rising, and Ryan Chelford in W1A, which is a completely different register and one he handles without visible strain.
His most prestigious credit is missing from the list here: Ted Burgess in the BBC's 2015 production of The Go-Between, which is the sort of casting that suggests directors see more in him than the police-and-hard-men circuit usually asks for.
Film has been incidental. An enlistment office MP in Captain America: The First Avenger, Oleg in Despite the Falling Snow, Jackson in The Windmill Massacre. The recent television is better: Pat Miller in Toxic Town (2025) puts him back in the kind of British drama that actually uses him.
Movies (5)
TV (9)
Where to start with Ben Batt
Shameless is where to begin, and the fact that it is the predictable answer does not make it the wrong one. Joe Pritchard is the role that defined how he gets cast, and the show at its best is a good deal sharper than its reputation as a long-running Channel 4 fixture suggests.
For the best single performance, Weekender is the pick. He plays the antagonist in a film about the late-1980s rave scene and gets to be genuinely unpleasant, which the television work rarely allows.
The procedurals do what they say: Scott & Bailey is the solid one, The Village is the grim, handsome period drama, and Toxic Town is the recent one to actually watch.
Two curiosities to finish. W1A shows he can play comedy, which the rest of this list would not tell you, and Barbarians Rising casts him as Spartacus in a docudrama that is more fun than it should be. Captain America: The First Avenger is a blink.