Dominic West, from The Wire to War: the charm his characters cannot afford

Dominic West

Photo: Ian Smith from London, England / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 15, 1969 Sheffield, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Actor
Known for	300, Finding Dory, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
Awards	British Academy Television · Broadcasting Press Guild · Satellite Award · SAG Award · Critics' Choice (shared)

Morgan Henderson is a tech billionaire, and War begins when his marriage to a film star, played by Sienna Miller, becomes a case for two rival London law firms. Dominic West plays him with the loose, half-apologetic grin he once gave Jimmy McNulty, the Baltimore detective of The Wire who did the right thing in the most self-destructive way he could find. The grin is the point. West has built a career on men whose charm gets them through every door and then becomes the reason the room falls in on them.

He says this one was a stretch. “He is a billionaire, a highly successful finance guy, which is a totally alien world to me,” he told the Irish Examiner as the series launched. The line sounds odd from an Old Etonian who lives in an Irish castle, yet it holds in the sense that matters to an actor: West has never been much interested in competence. His men are clever, attractive and hopeless at the part of life that requires saying no.

The Eton chapter tends to swallow the rest of the story. West grew up in Sheffield, where he was born on 15 October 1969, the sixth of seven children of Thomas West, who ran a plastics factory, and Pauline, an actress, in a family of largely Irish descent. After school he spent four months herding cattle in Argentina before reading English literature at Trinity College Dublin. He graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1995, the year he played Richmond, the young earl who finishes off Ian McKellen’s king, in Richard Loncraine’s Richard III.

For a while he was the handsome Englishman at the edge of American films. In Chicago he was Fred Casely, the lover Renée Zellweger shoots before the first song is over, and he shared the Screen Actors Guild award for the film’s ensemble. In 300 he was Theron, the Spartan politician who sells out his king.

The Wire changed the scale of everything. David Simon’s series ran on HBO from 2002 to 2008, and West, a public-school Englishman, played its Irish-American detective so convincingly that critics singled out the accent. McNulty drank, lied to his bosses and wrecked his marriage, and West never once asked the audience to forgive him. In the final season he also directed an episode, “Took”.

Back in Britain, 2011 showed how far the range went. In The Hour he was Hector Madden, the smooth anchor of a 1950s BBC current-affairs programme, a part that brought a Golden Globe nomination. In Appropriate Adult he played the serial killer Fred West and won the BAFTA for Best Actor; one of the killer’s daughters said he had caught the man’s “evil essence”, down to the way he walked. That autumn he went home to the Sheffield Crucible to play Iago opposite Clarke Peters, his colleague from The Wire, as Othello.

The Affair gave him his longest run after Baltimore: five seasons on Showtime as Noah Solloway, a novelist whose infidelity the series retold from competing points of view, and another Golden Globe nomination. Around it came period parts: Ernest Hemingway in Genius, the exploitative husband Willy in Colette, Jean Valjean in the BBC’s Les Misérables. In Pride he was the gay activist Jonathan Blake.

Then came Prince Charles. West took over the role for the last two seasons of The Crown, the years of the royal divorce, and earned Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for it. The casting arrived at an awkward moment. In the autumn of 2020, while talks were under way, photographs of West in Rome with Lily James, his co-star in The Pursuit of Love, ran around the world. West and his wife, Catherine FitzGerald, answered by posing outside their home with a handwritten note: “Our marriage is strong and we’re very much still together.” Years later he called the furore “absurd” and “deeply stressful” for his family.

The coverage leaned hard on the overlap between his screen adulterers and his private life, a reading that has never quite gone away. The fairer criticism is about range rather than morals. West is at his most exact when a part refuses him sympathy, as with Fred West or the colder stretches of Noah Solloway. The warmer roles, the gruff Uncle Matthew of The Pursuit of Love or the visiting film star of the Downton Abbey films, spend the charm without ever testing it, and too much of his screen work since The Wire has asked for exactly that.

The recent record is crowded. He returned as Guy Dexter in Downton Abbey: A New Era and Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, played the intelligence officer Dudley Clarke in SAS: Rogue Heroes and turns up as the CIA director in Paramount+’s The Agency, where one reviewer noted that the American accent is still in working order. In 2024 he took Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge into the West End as Eddie Carbone. This year he joined Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton in Pablo Trapero’s & Sons, released in British cinemas in August, and crossed Kyrgyzstan on horseback with Clarke Peters for the documentary Beyond the Silk Road.

War, created by George Kay and directed by Ben Taylor, premiered on HBO and HBO Max on 1 October and on Sky and NOW on 2 October, eight episodes long. It is built as an anthology, with a different headline case for each season. West and Miller first shared a stage in a West End As You Like It in 2005, and he says the familiarity made the marriage easy to play. “The harder task was manufacturing the opposite.”

Away from sets, West lives at Glin Castle in County Limerick with FitzGerald, whom he married at Glin in 2010. They have four children, and he has an older daughter, Martha, from his relationship with Polly Astor. He once turned down a part in Game of Thrones because of the time it would have kept him from home, and in 2013 he walked to the South Pole for the Walking With The Wounded charity.

Two more men are already waiting. On 15 October German cinemas open Call Me Queen, Emily Atef’s drama about the AIDS crisis in late-1990s Kenya, in which he plays Warren, and he has been shooting The Man Who Stole Portugal, Thomas Napper’s comedy about the 1925 banknote fraud against the Bank of Portugal, alongside Richard E. Grant. Neither is a lead. That has never seemed to trouble him. The actor who could have stayed McNulty for good keeps choosing the role that lets him be wrong in an interesting way.