Trust Me actor Alfred Enoch: From Harry Potter to modern hero

Trust Me airs weekly on Tuesdays
Lead: Alfred Enoch as Jamie McCain
BBC

As the Marvel Avengers superhero juggernaut reaches its blockbuster conclusion this week, Alfred Enoch is making a timely bid to bring us back down to earth.

Not all heroes wear capes, says Enoch, the star of the second series of Dan Sefton’s psychological drama Trust Me.

Indeed, some struggle to heft one over their shoulders. In the BBC series Enoch plays Corporal Jamie McCain, a paraplegic war veteran left wheelchair-bound after being shot in Afghanistan and plunging through a rooftop, then confined to a spinal unit in a murky Glasgow hospital where a killer is on the loose. No one is to be trusted, as a medicated McCain tries to differentiate between night terrors and mortal peril.

“At the beginning it’s a battle to raise his arm up,” says Enoch. “It’s getting out of bed. Showering. Whatever it is, there are these physical challenges.” It invites us to see the world from a different angle, he says. “Nowadays the expectation for what we consider extraordinary, or what is physically impressive, is very high. We’re used to seeing heroes leap over buildings or clear whole flights of stairs in a single bound in superhero movies, which are fantastic — the kind of stuff I loved as a kid. But there’s something interesting about a story that goes against the current of that and brings it down to something smaller, to what is physically impressive in this context.”

Enoch consulted war veterans and doctors to nail the technical details. “You don’t want doctors at home going, ‘Oh, nah, come on.’ I’ve got friends who are doctors, and they wouldn’t let me live it down. I was like, ‘We’ve got to make sure we don’t cock this up.’” Using the wheelchair was “tiring” but “eye -opening”. “I found myself walking around the street, looking at steps and thinking goodness, you’d struggle to get down those in a chair.”

Lead: Alfred Enoch as Jamie McCain
BBC/ Red Production Company

The 30-year-old cut his acting chops as Dean Thomas in Harry Potter. While other child actors from the series have spoken of struggling to shake the film’s hold on their CVs, Enoch shrugs off any idea that it was a burden. “As big a thing as it was, I didn’t have much to do with it, so it didn’t hang so heavily around my neck”, he says. “Don’t get me wrong, it was an amazing thing to be part of, but for me it was ideal because it was on a huge scale — an education — but I came out of that and no one was like, ‘You’ll always be Dean Thomas from Harry Potter’, because most people don’t know who Dean Thomas from Harry Potter is.”

That said, he admits he’s worked hard to duck any typecasting. “A friend of mine said the only power an actor has is to say no. I think that’s stating it emphatically, but you come out of a job and you’ve been fortunate that it’s something people see and that they enjoy. Often there’s a pressure to — not a pressure, but the thing that then comes to you next is often something similar.”

Harry Potter: Alfred Enoch starred in the hit film franchise (Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.)

Since Potter, Enoch’s roles have ranged from screen to stage: Edgar in King Lear at the Manchester Royal Exchange, Titus Lartius in Josie Rourke’s Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse, and Philotus in Nicholas Hytner’s Timon of Athens. His most recent play was Red, directed by Michael Grandage and with Alfred Molina as painter Mark Rothko, at the Wyndham’s Theatre.

A Londoner who attended Westminster School (where he was an “Alfie”), his career has taken him to Los Angeles to film his recurring part in US drama How to Get Away With Murder as legal student Wes Gibbins, opposite Oscar-winner Viola Davis, and now to Rio de Janeiro, where he’s working on a Brazilian film project. It helps that he speaks fluent Portuguese (his mother is Brazilian) and that acting runs in the family: his dad is William Russell, best known as Ian Chesterton, a companion to the first Doctor Who, William Hartnell, from the first episode in 1963.

“The best thing about the career is that it’s not the same job, not the same medium, not the same part, not the same tone. Everything can change, everything’s up for grabs. I wouldn’t want a career working only in one medium.”

Long may it continue.

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