Jack Davenport
Jack Davenport is an actor, born 1973.
Davenport arrived through two British ensemble shows that could hardly be less alike. This Life (1996) was a scratchy, sexed-up drama about young lawyers sharing a house. Coupling (2000) was a joke machine in which he played Steve Taylor, the reasonable man surrounded by lunatics, and delivered several monologues that British comedy still quotes. Both parts asked him to be the calm centre, and he has rarely been asked anything else since.
Hollywood read the accent and the bearing and cast accordingly. Norrington in the Pirates of the Caribbean films is the interesting exception: he begins as a stiff naval officer built to lose the girl and, across three films, curdles into something bitter and half-ruined, which is a good deal more than the role required. The Talented Mr. Ripley used him for one long gentle stretch of its second half. Kingsman: The Secret Service used him for roughly four minutes and got full value.
Television has been the steadier employer. FlashForward, Smash, Breathless, Why Women Kill, Dr. Death and The Morning Show all cast him as some variety of competent, faintly smug professional, and the thing he does well is let the smugness slip at exactly the wrong moment for the character. It is a narrow lane, driven with real precision.
Movies (20)
- Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
- Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)
- Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
- The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
- The Libertine (2004)
- The Wedding Date (2005)
- The Boat That Rocked (2009)
- The Wilde Wedding (2017)
- A United Kingdom (2016)
- The Bunker (2001)
- The 50 Greatest Television Dramas (2007)
- Russell Mulcahy’s Tale of the Mummy (1998)
- Immortality (1998)
- Guernica (2016)
- The Stolen (2017)
- The Moth (1997)
- The Wyvern Mystery (2000)
- Bonus Track (2024)
- Vivien & The Florist
TV (17)
- The Morning Show (2019)
- Richard & Judy (2001)
- Why Women Kill (2019)
- Accused (2023)
- Dr. Death (2021)
- Smash (2012)
- FlashForward (2009)
- All's Fair (2025)
- Coupling (2000)
- This Life (1996)
- The Assassin (2025)
- Deception (2018)
- The Forsytes (2025)
- Next of Kin (2018)
- Swingtown (2008)
- Ultraviolet (1998)
- The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant (2005)
Where to start with Jack Davenport
Nothing else he has done is as purely enjoyable as the early seasons of Coupling, where the writing hands him long comic arias that almost no other sitcom actor of that era could have landed. It also shows the timing that the American work mostly wastes.
For the films, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl introduces Norrington as a stuffed shirt and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End finishes what that character turns into; the pair is more rewarding than either alone. The Talented Mr. Ripley is the best film he has appeared in. Kingsman: The Secret Service is a brisk, funny cameo. On television, The Morning Show is the current version of the type, and This Life is where it all began.
The British television
This Life was a genuine cultural event in Britain in 1996 and Coupling is the sitcom most Britons can quote. Ultraviolet is the underseen vampire series that a certain kind of viewer will not stop recommending.
Pirates of the Caribbean
Norrington starts as a stuffy naval officer and the trilogy keeps finding more for him, which is more than most supporting characters in those films get. The period work either side of it is thin.
The American work
Fifteen years of American television, mostly as an Englishman who is not to be trusted. The Morning Show is the best of it, and Kingsman is the film cameo people are surprised to spot him in.