It must be so galling for an actor to be blessed with just the right face for one kind of part. Galling for good actors anyway. Pretty sweet for the others – “You need a face someone would definitely kill for? Put this useless hunk/babe in there and just move the scenery round them.”
Matthew Goode is, nomenclaturally and otherwise, one of the former, but cursed with a face best described as “modern patrician” and has therefore been the first port of call for just about every period drama there has been for the last 20 years. He’s been in everything from Brideshead Revisited (as Charles Ryder) on the big screen, to Downton Abbey (Henry Talbot) and The Crown (where at least he got to play that bounder Lord Snowdon) on the small one. Judging by the relish with which he seizes the chance to play contemporary and ignoble in his new outing, the psychological thriller Dept. Q, he must have been going quietly mad with frustration throughout.
