You Know Who This Guy Is
No matter the role, Freddie Fox is playing your new favorite unlikable snot.
Hey, are you an actor? Are you up for a part in a prestige television series, either a new one coming to a streaming service or one that’s been around for a few seasons and is bringing in a new character or two? Is the part you’re reading for kind of an unlikable snot, the type of character the audience is meant to hate, not so much in a This person is evil and dastardly and I hope our hero defeats him way as an Uggghhh, I need to see this guy get injured and/or humiliated way? Is the character British? Well, best of luck to you in your career going forward, but this part is almost definitely going to Freddie Fox.
There’s a good chance you’ve seen Freddie Fox in something you’ve watched recently. He’s been in a slew of shows over the past four of five years. Some of you will recognize him from his periodic appearances on The Great as King Hugo, a Swedish monarch with a habit of sneering and behaving like a weasel. I first encountered him on Slow Horses, the extremely bingeable Apple TV+ series where Gary Oldman farts his way to solving mysteries. He plays a character named James “Spider” Webb, an insufferable and pompous dweeb who works in British intelligence and seems to exist solely so that he can get punched or shot or foiled once every season as a form of cathartic release for the audience.
Here is a screencap that tells you everything you need to know about Spider, a character I disliked with such intensity that it took me weeks to realize that “Spider Webb” was a play on words.
Right? You get it now. You know who this guy is. And you probably hate him already, just based on this image. This is Freddie Fox doing Freddie Fox things.
He did more of those things this year in an episode of The Gentlemen, the Guy Ritchie Netflix series based on the 2019 Guy Ritchie movie, the one where a cash-strapped British aristocrat finds himself neck-deep in the weed business. Freddie Fox popped up about halfway through the season as a similarly cash-strapped aristocrat who needed help. You see, he was being blackmailed. By an investigative journalist. All because he had a collection of paintings and memorabilia from a divisive artist.
Another screencap will help, I think.
Look, I’m not usually in the business of spoiling twists in television shows that debuted less than six months ago. I understand that there’s a lot out there, and it might take people time to get to things. But I don’t think there’s any way around this one. I’m going to need to tell you who the artist is, the one Freddie Fox’s character admired so much that he opened himself up to a blackmail scheme that threatened his family’s entire estate.
Are you ready?
Okay.
It was Hitler. Adolf Hitler. Yes, the one you are thinking of. The show didn’t take any liberties with changing the history on this one. He was straight-up a fan of Hitler’s paintings, so much so that he had one of Hitler’s testicles in a jar as a memento. Couple that with the posture and the stench of smug arrogance wafting out from under his turtleneck and you can see it all again: Freddie Fox is eating here. Just devouring every last despicable morsel. The man has leaned all the way into his niche.
It’s an admirable thing, really, this ability to take what could first scan as a weakness — I don’t want to say he has a “punchable” face, but I will say he has a face he can make extremely punch-worthy when the situation calls for it — and turn it into a strength. He’s harnessing his powers right in front of our eyes. It’s exciting, in a way.
That’s why I was so thrilled when he popped up in this season of House of the Dragon. He plays a knight named Gwayne Hightower, which, between Freddie Fox’s track record and the way the name “Gwayne” sounds when it comes out of your mouth (say it out loud now, trust me), had me all primed for hatred. What’s funny is that he hasn’t even done anything that bad, really. Not yet, at least. The closest we’ve come is “tried to slither out of duty to go get drunk with his buddies and in doing so made the dumbest character on the show — Criston, blech — look smart for the first and only time in his entire life,” which would be more annoying if the bar hadn’t just been set at “Hitler aficionado.” That’s going to throw off the readings for a while.
But anyway, yes, he is still making the face. Allow me to enter one last screencap into evidence.
This is what I mean about the face. You see it, right, even in this still image? You don’t even need to watch the show to know how this line sounds. The dismissive tone comes through so clearly that you can hear it with your eyes somehow. You want this man to get cooked by a dragon. You might even want it to happen on a show that doesn’t have dragons. That’s how good he is at being this guy. You might accept the narrative leap of a previously unmentioned mythical hellbeast swooping in and torching him out of nowhere just because it’s so satisfying. I vote we cast him in one of the Yellowstone spinoffs and give it a try.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with any of this. Alan Rickman dined out on playing a villain for decades. Jason Statham has played the same character in almost every movie he’s ever been in, except for Spy, in which he played a satirical version of every character he’s ever played. Jennifer Coolidge owns a very nice house in New Orleans she paid for with checks earned from playing flighty goofballs. That’s great. It’s comforting sometimes seeing an actor appear onscreen and immediately saying “Oh, I know who this guy is.” There’s job security in it, too. Freddie Fox could be a wonderful man for all I know, but he’s going to keep working as long as there are entitled British weasels being written into scripts. He’s the best in the business at being the worst little snot on the screen.
Which brings me back to you, the hypothetical actor I addressed in the introduction. This is why you do not have any chance of landing that part as an unlikable British scamp, at least not if Freddie Fox is up for it, too. In fact, if you’re walking into the audition and see him walking out, you might as well just turn around and get in your car and drive home. Freddie Fox has this particular market cornered for the foreseeable future.
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