Jason Watkins
Jason Watkins is an actor, born 1966.
English television keeps a short list of actors it calls when a scene needs somebody unremarkable to turn into the most interesting thing in the room, and Jason Watkins has been near the top of it for years. The record here starts with Wayne in the 1989 film High Hopes and then broadens into everything: Herrick in Being Human, Gavin in Trollied, Simon Harwood in the BBC self-satire W1A, Gordon Shakespeare across three Nativity films, Harold Wilson in the third season of The Crown, and Detective Sergeant Dodds in McDonald & Dodds.
The trick is that he never plays small men as small. Herrick is a mild, chatty, faintly cheerful presence who is also the most frightening thing in the series, and Watkins gets there by refusing to raise his voice. Simon Harwood speaks entirely in management noise and is somehow always winning. Tim Ifield in Line of Duty is a forensic examiner whose fastidious politeness becomes almost unbearable to watch. The common thread is a man being pleasant while something else moves underneath, and it is a harder register to sustain than the showier alternative.
The lead role that changed his standing was The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies, a two-part drama in which he plays the real man at its centre, and which won him the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actor. Since then the range has widened rather than narrowed: Solomon Coop in Taboo, Brian Masters in Des, Emlyn Hooson in A Very English Scandal, Alfred Pennyworth in Batman: Caped Crusader, and small, sharp turns in Wicked Little Letters and The Phoenician Scheme.
Movies (21)
- Enola Holmes 3 (2026)
- Wild Child (2008)
- The Golden Compass (2007)
- The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
- Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
- Wicked Little Letters (2024)
- Confetti (2006)
- Split Second (1992)
- Hampstead (2017)
- The Children Act (2018)
- The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018)
- Onegin (1999)
- Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger! (2012)
- Dragonfly (2025)
- Circus (2000)
- Sixty Six (2006)
- Nativity! (2009)
- The Trick (2021)
- Miss Austen Regrets (2008)
- High Hopes (1989)
- Nativity 3: Dude, Where's My Donkey?! (2014)
TV (32)
- The Crown (2016)
- Line of Duty (2012)
- Inside No. 9 (2014)
- Taboo (2017)
- Batman: Caped Crusader (2024)
- Being Human (2009)
- Lark Rise to Candleford (2008)
- The Hollow Crown (2012)
- Trollied (2011)
- McDonald & Dodds (2020)
- Atlantis (2013)
- Des (2020)
- Around the World in 80 Days (2021)
- Friday Night Dinner (2011)
- Little Dorrit (2008)
- W1A (2014)
- Watership Down (2018)
- Dear England (2026)
- The Secret (2016)
- Safe House (2015)
- A Very English Scandal (2018)
- The Game (2025)
- The Catch (2023)
- Bodies (2004)
- Funland (2005)
- Falling (2026)
- The Virgin Queen (2006)
- The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies (2014)
- Hitmen (2020)
- Little Crackers (2010)
Where to start with Jason Watkins
The award one is also the right one: The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies. It is two episodes, it is about a man being taken apart in public, and Watkins plays him without a single bid for sympathy, which is why it earns so much.
Then split by mood. For comedy, W1A is the sharpest thing he has done, and Inside No. 9 gives him a self-contained half hour in the best British anthology of the last decade. For menace, Being Human is essential, since Herrick is the reason that show works at all, and Line of Duty contains the single tensest hour on his record.
The Crown is the prestige entry and his Harold Wilson is the warmest performance in that whole season. McDonald & Dodds is comfortable Sunday-night detective television built entirely around his rumpled charm, and Wicked Little Letters shows how much he can do with four scenes.
The dramatic turn
After twenty-five years of comedy he started playing real men in serious trouble. The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies won the BAFTA, Des is the Dennis Nilsen drama, and The Secret is a true-crime case from Northern Ireland.
The comedy
Simon Harwood in W1A is a BBC executive of no discernible function and one of the great British comic creations of the last decade. Inside No. 9 uses him twice, and the Nativity! films are the ones British parents know him from.
Period drama and the leads
McDonald & Dodds finally gave him a lead, a mild detective who is much sharper than he looks. Being Human is the genre television, and the costume work runs from Dickens to Shakespeare to a 2024 comedy about poison-pen letters.