Christian Brassington
Christian Brassington is an actor, born 1983.
Brassington built an early career on playing real Englishmen before they became themselves. In 2006 Channel 4 cast him as a young Tony Blair, and in 2009 the More4 drama documentary When Boris Met Dave had him play a young Boris Johnson. Around those he did period supporting work in features: Archduke Charles in Elizabeth: The Golden Age in 2007, Phillip Hurst in Easy Virtue the year after.
The role that defines him is Ossie Whitworth, the vicar he played in the third and fourth series of Poldark. It is a genuinely difficult part, because Whitworth's piety is a delivery mechanism for appetite, and the temptation is to camp it up so the audience knows the actor disapproves. Brassington refuses that. He plays the smugness straight and never asks you to enjoy it, which is why the character landed as hard as it did.
Elsewhere the casting is what you would expect: functionaries, minor heavies, men in good suits carrying bad news. Max Forrester in the London underworld thriller Hummingbird, a secretary to the Cabinet in Our Kind of Traitor, a reception clerk in Jolt, Peters in St Trinian's 2, Cpl. Cal Gillespie in Land Girls, Dominic in The Last Letter from Your Lover, Henry in Fisherman's Friends. He writes as well, which an acting credit list has no way of showing.
Movies (11)
TV (2)
Where to start with Christian Brassington
Nothing else in this filmography competes with Poldark, so start there and go to the third series, where Ossie Whitworth arrives and the show acquires a villain you cannot laugh off. The decision to underplay the piety is what makes it work.
After that the pleasures are smaller, and worth being honest about. Elizabeth: The Golden Age gives him a court suitor in a film that cares more about costume than character. Hummingbird is the best of the features, a bruised London crime story with an unusually sad centre, and he is on the wrong side of it. Our Kind of Traitor puts him in the Whitehall machinery of a le Carre adaptation, Easy Virtue in a country-house comedy, and Fisherman's Friends in the friendliest thing on the list.