Back in his twenties, Tom Burke was told by a British TV channel that his face didn’t fit. Literally. The actor, who had reconstructive surgery as a boy before winning a place at Rada, was close to a part in an “iconic period drama”, he remembers. “I very nearly got cast,” he tells me, “but I got told I didn’t have the right face for that channel. And I didn’t know if it was my cleft lip, or what it was.”
The star of Strike and The Souvenir doesn’t want to say which channel, for obvious reasons, but the remark shattered his confidence. Today, Burke admits he is “very pleased and frankly surprised” to have become something of a pin-up. In the flesh, the 42-year-old has a kind of rumpled handsomeness, his hair and beard flecked with the odd hint of grey. Around his wrist is a beaded bracelet he fiddles with; a red necklace dangles between the lapels of his French worker jacket. Far from the lugubrious men he often inhabits on screen, he’s smiling and funny. There’s something, too, in the way that he edits as he speaks, often letting sentences trail off before languorously reconstructing them to say pretty much the same thing. He can shift gear quickly, though, to be impassioned and direct.
