Samuel Barnett
Samuel Barnett is an actor, born 1980.
Alan Bennett wrote the part that started him. Samuel Barnett played Posner in The History Boys on stage and then in the 2006 film, the smallest and most exposed of the boys, in love with a classmate and painfully aware that being clever will not rescue him from it. He was born in Whitby, North Yorkshire in 1980 and trained at LAMDA, and the Bennett connection came back around later with The Lady in the Van.
He has an unusual quality for a leading man: he reads as intelligent and slightly unsteady at once, which is why the roles that suit him are people running on nerves. Renfield in Penny Dreadful is a meek functionary being hollowed out by something he cannot admit he wants. Daniel Stroud in the BBC mockumentary Twenty Twelve is a voice of professional calm inside an organisation where nothing is under control.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency handed him a lead and is the fullest use of him. His Dirk insists the universe is arranging clues on his behalf and proceeds with the manic certainty of a man who is almost never right and occasionally, alarmingly, is. Sustaining that tone across a series, funny and lonely at the same time, is much harder than the performance makes it look.
The rest is character work in period and prestige drama: Cecil Beaton in Lee, Thomas Adams in John Adams, Paul in Mrs. Henderson Presents, and a true-crime role in Four Lives.
Movies (9)
TV (11)
Where to start with Samuel Barnett
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is the one to start with, because it is the only thing here that puts Barnett at the centre and then asks him to hold a very difficult tone for hours: absurdist comedy played by a man who seems genuinely lonely. It either grabs you in one episode or it does not.
Then go back to The History Boys, where Posner remains the most affecting thing in a very good ensemble film, and pair it with The Lady in the Van for the Alan Bennett bookend. Penny Dreadful gives him the best-written supporting arc on television, Twenty Twelve is the sharpest comic use of him, and Mrs. Henderson Presents is the early film credit that shows the stage training still visible. Lee and John Adams are the handsome period options if that is what you are after.