Gavin Drea
Irish television gave Gavin Drea his footing. He appeared in the RTE crime series Love/Hate, and later played Michael Collins in Resistance, the drama about the War of Independence, which is about as loaded a piece of casting as Irish television offers. Around those came the BBC drama My Mother and Other Strangers.
He is a useful actor to have in a cast because he reads as immediately likeable and can switch that off without changing his face. Wedding Season uses the first half of that; Surface uses the second. Callum Walsh is a character the audience is meant to keep reassessing, and the performance is calibrated so both readings stay available for as long as the story needs them.
The screen career splits between international productions and character work. He was Sergent Cooper in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Mark in the Joanna Rakoff adaptation My Salinger Year, Philip Mitchell in Sweetness in the Belly, Alaric in the docudrama series Barbarians Rising, and Nicky Fitzgerald in Daisy Jones & the Six, the wealthy European who attaches himself to the band's most volatile member. More recently he has appeared in Baby Reindeer and the thriller Sharp Corner. He also works in games, and is among the voice cast of Cyberpunk 2077.
Beyond that the public record is thin, down to and including his date of birth, so the credits are where the story has to be read from.
Movies (4)
TV (7)
Where to start with Gavin Drea
Surface is the best showcase, and the reason is structural. It is a series about unreliable memory, so every performance in it has to work two ways at once, and Drea's does. Start there.
Love/Hate is the other essential, a crime series with a much harder texture than its export-friendly reputation suggests, and the place he began. Resistance pairs with it as the historical counterpart, with Drea as Michael Collins.
For the lighter register, Wedding Season is a comic thriller that runs on charm and knows it. Daisy Jones & the Six hands him a smaller but memorable role inside a much bigger show, Baby Reindeer is the most talked-about thing he appears in even though his part is brief, and My Salinger Year is the quiet one, a literary period piece where the acting has nowhere to hide.