Paddy Considine
Paddy Considine is an actor, born 1973.
Paddy Considine grew up in Burton upon Trent and made his first significant screen appearance in A Room for Romeo Brass in 1999, the first of several collaborations with Shane Meadows. Pawel Pawlikowski cast him as Alfie in Last Resort the following year, and the template was set. He plays men in independent British films who are holding something down.
The specific skill is containment. Considine's performances are usually about pressure that has not yet been released, and he can hold it for a whole film. Richard in Dead Man's Shoes, a soldier back in a small town, is the extreme case: mostly quiet, and the quiet is what frightens you. He won the 2005 Empire Award for Best British Actor for it.
The surprise of his career is that he is also funny. DS Andy Wainwright in Hot Fuzz and Steven Prince in The World's End are broad comic performances from an actor whose reputation was built on menace, and he is completely at ease in both.
He writes and directs too. The short Dog Altogether won a BAFTA and a Silver Lion at Venice in 2007, and its feature version, Tyrannosaur, won him a BAFTA for outstanding debut. He has two British Academy Film Awards, three Evening Standard British Film Awards, and Olivier and Tony nominations for stage work in 2018 and 2019.
Since 2022 he has been King Viserys in House of the Dragon, a part built almost entirely out of physical decline and exhaustion, and by a wide margin the most widely seen thing he has done.
Movies (35)
- Hot Fuzz (2007)
- Heads of State (2025)
- The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
- Deep Cover (2025)
- Blitz (2011)
- Cinderella Man (2005)
- The World's End (2013)
- Child 44 (2015)
- Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1980 (2009)
- The Girl with All the Gifts (2016)
- Pride (2014)
- The Death of Stalin (2017)
- Macbeth (2015)
- The Double (2014)
- Wife & Dog (2026)
- Submarine (2011)
- Pu-239 (2006)
- Miss You Already (2015)
- 24 Hour Party People (2002)
- In America (2003)
- My Summer of Love (2005)
- Now Is Good (2012)
- Dead Man's Shoes (2004)
- Tyrannosaur (2011)
- The Backwoods (2006)
- How to Build a Girl (2020)
- The Cry of the Owl (2009)
- Last Resort (2000)
- Wolf (2021)
- Stoned (2005)
TV (6)
Where to start with Paddy Considine
Everything starts with Dead Man's Shoes. It is a small, cheap, very hard British film, and his performance is the reason anyone talks about him at all. Go in knowing as little as possible.
In America is the necessary counterweight, a father holding a family together in New York, and the warmest work he has done. Watch the two back to back and you have the range.
Then Tyrannosaur, which he wrote and directed rather than starred in, as bleak as the title suggests and better acted than most films you will see this year.
For the lighter side, Hot Fuzz and The World's End are both funnier for having him in them. House of the Dragon is the mainstream door, My Summer of Love and Last Resort are the early independent films worth digging up, and The Death of Stalin gets him one perfect scene.