Matthew Goode's performance in Dept. Q proves that being young and handsome isn't all it's cracked up to be

I once listened (while playing the world’s smallest violin) to the indisputably handsome Ioan Gruffudd lament that he wasn’t first choice for the breadth of roles he was after. “I can only really be a leading man,” he explained, and helpfully drew an air circle around his face, “looking like this.”

I must stress, he didn’t sound arrogant, just seeing his selling point for the limitation that it had become. It’s a first-world problem to be sure, but for an actor, it’s a real one – and borne out by Gruffudd’s struggle to emulate his breakthrough as naval officer Horatio Hornblower.

I was reminded of this conversation having binged, like everyone else, on Dept. Q.

There’s nothing new under the Scottish sun here, really – this Danish series of cold case crime novels has been given a transformative new lease of life, with lots of Netflix money, direction by Queen’s Gambit showrunner Scott Frank, a bleak Edinburgh setting, sharp writing and a great cast led by Matthew Goode as DCI Carl Morck.

He’s angry, lonely and guilty about an incident in the past that saw a young officer tragically killed and even his own partner paralysed.

We’re used to watching TV detectives who don’t suffer fools, but Morck doesn’t suffer anyone, including himself. One colleague tells him, “Don’t act all human, it doesn’t suit you. Just makes you look like a bigger arsehole.”

It’s a career-changing performance: full of twitching cynicism with glimpses of compassion, all the more exciting when you consider Goode’s posh, unruffled schtick in everything from Brideshead Revisited to Downton Abbey. His Lord Snowdon in The Crown gave a hint of unrest behind the arched eyebrow, but Morck is something else.

Dept. Q producer Andy Harries describes Goode as “handsome, charming and best known for those suave roles where a touch of the Hugh Grant is required, but he is so much more than that”. Well, yes, and so is the modern-day Hugh Grant, as we discovered when he retired his Four Weddings era floppy fop and brought us his tour de force as scandal-hit politician Jeremy Thorpe, then managed to top that with glorious self-mockery in Paddington 2. Perhaps Harries was thus inspired; in recruiting Goode for Dept. Q he reveals, “casting against type was the idea”.

It makes you wonder whether handsome, young actors grow into these roles, or were they inside them all along – just offered not to them but to character actors like Eddie Marsan and Timothy Spall? The Night Manager did the same thing equally well, creating menacing villains out of traditional crowd-pleasers Tom Hollander and Hugh Laurie.

Of course, Laurie had already confounded all expectations as the grumpy lead in House – so successfully that the party to celebrate 100 episodes was the first time the show’s medical advisor, Lisa Sanders, discovered he wasn’t American.

They say that up to the age of 40 your face is God-given, after that it’s the face you deserve. Maybe the same goes for acting roles. Of course, this lot get first pick of good scripts, but lots of handsome younger actors have fallen by the wayside, so it’s a credit to this bunch that they’ve kept going, accepted the necessary swapping of the appeal of youth for character, complexity and all the other great consolations of age. Just like the rest of us, but with everyone watching. What’s the secret?

The wonderful Rufus Sewell summed it up beautifully when I put this to him a while ago. He said: “I had a huge ego as a young man, and I probably still do, trumped only by my enduring ego as an actor. That’s even bigger.”

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