Even with the dodgy definition of a globe-spanning Zoom connection, Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s 33-year-old face looks decidedly boyish. After a career of playing wide-eyed kids ever since he was Sam, Liam Neeson’s lovelorn stepson in Love Actually in 2003, he finally got to play grown-ups in shows such as The Queen’s Gambit and Pistol in the 2020s.
In Danny Boyle’s 2022 series about the Sex Pistols, Brodie-Sangster stole the show as punk mastermind Malcolm McLaren, who acted like a sort of situationist Fagin – of Dickens’ Oliver Twist – towards the damaged London street urchins in the band. Brodie-Sangster thought so, too. He tells the Listener he remembers writing “Fagin” in the margins of his script. As McLaren, he was finally playing somebody near his own age. It wouldn’t be his last semi-Dickensian character, either.
In his teens and early 20s, he had been in the dystopian YA trilogy The Maze Runner. He was in Game of Thrones for two seasons (as Jojen Reed), Wolf Hall for one, and a Star Wars movie … well, for a couple of seconds. Talking of franchises, had things gone his way at the 2000 audition, he would have been Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter films, too. He has said he was bitterly disappointed at the time but these days he’s more philosophical: “Ninety per cent of the time you don’t get the role, so you have to find a way of being okay with it.” And given his career and Rupert Grint’s more modest one since, you suspect he’s learnt to live with it.
Brodie-Sangster has carved out a place for himself somewhere between character actor and off-beat leading man. It’s been helped by that baby face – he played a young Paul McCartney in the early days of John Lennon drama Nowhere Boy – and a delivery that in any accent can make him sound like the smartest guy in the room.
But there’s a trace of boyhood in his new role. He’s the title character in The Artful Dodger, which takes the ringleader pickpocket of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and transports him to Australia. There, a few decades later, his manual dexterity has led to a career as a trainee surgeon in the days before anaesthetic, sterilisation or actual medical qualifications for those wielding the hacksaws.
The funny thing is, perhaps, that Brodie-Sangster, an actor who has played a fair few boys who talked like men, is playing Dodger/ Jack Dawkins as a grown-up. The Dodger of the book and past screen versions became a beloved character for being a juvenile delinquent who sounded many decades older. Was his casting perhaps so an audience could still see the boy in the bloke?
“Ha. I hadn’t thought of that at all. That’s probably a question for someone else but it’s interesting … maybe even if it’s a subconscious decision.”
In the settlement of “Port Victory”, Dawkins is joined by old mentor-in-crime Fagin, who has apparently survived being hanged (as he was in the book) and is played by a very lively David Thewlis.
Much of the eight-part series for Disney gets its spark from the pair’s double act. Fagin is up to his old tricks and is trying to drag the reformed Dawkins back into petty larceny. Meanwhile, he strikes up a relationship with Lady Belle Fox (Maia Mitchell), the governor’s daughter and an aspiring doctor. Also featuring in the show’s rogues gallery are Tim Minchin and Damon Herriman.
“I was a big fan of David Thewlis. We did a chemistry read together and it was just easy, and really fun … and when things are easy, it means they are good. I really enjoyed bouncing off David.”
Of the many past versions of the story, Brodie-Sangster cites the enduring 1968 musical Oliver! as his favourite.
“It was one of the films that first scared me … but I think the kind of The Lost Boys element to it is exciting and fun, and a bit dangerous. I think everyone’s favourite character is Dodger – he’s so much fun. And I grew up in South London. It wasn’t quite like that. But I suppose I had some kind of connection to him in that way.”
Due to his dyslexia, he doesn’t have a relationship with the original book. “I found penetrating a Dickens novel to always be a hard task.” But he liked the idea of Dickens transported to the Lucky Country and the resulting show where the grim streets of slate-grey London are replaced with sandstone and sunshine, even if the local fauna could ruin the occasional take.
“It’s got that kind of sweaty look to it, and it’s got blue skies and this beating sunshine coming down. And all the noises. Australia is very noisy. There’s lots of birds. In England, they sing and tweet and over there they squawk and make lots of big, loud noises.”
This isn’t the first Aussie liberty taken with Oliver Twist. There was a 2001 colonial-period kids’ show, Escape of the Artful Dodger. The novel had Dodger/Dawkins sentenced to “transportation for life”, which dovetails with the actual history of the Parkhurst Apprentices, juvenile convicts sent to Australia and New Zealand and eventually pardoned. Plus, Ikey Solomon, the notorious London underworld figure Dickens is thought to have based Fagin on, due to his much-publicised trial, was transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1831.
It was all a bit of a history lesson for the actor.
“I had never really looked into Australian history. What the Brits did over there was terrible but fascinating … and some of the locations were period correct, where prisoners had been shipped and held in cells. It was quite eerie to be in period costume depicting similar sorts of situations and imagery in an environment where it actually happened.”
It might be a Disney show about a former likely lad, but the series is curiously grown-up in its depictions of the period’s surgical techniques, with Dawkins conducting amputations before a paying audience.
“I’m not quite sure how Disney felt about it and we had notes and memos when they saw the first episode and that we should cut down there, but it was so well done. It’s an important part of it – surgery back then was bloody and brutal and nasty and dirty and most of the time you died. So, I think we’d be doing a disservice if we didn’t make it that way.”
The props department borrowed some Victorian surgical instruments from a museum for Brodie-Sangster to wield, which as Dawkins he does with quite a flourish. It’s not exactly a less-is-more kind of role, is it?
“No, and that was a hard thing to work out – what’s the level? Especially when we’ve got quite a few supporting characters who are quite over the top. How much should Dodger also be that or should he be a bit more of a grounded individual for the audience? That was something I was always kind of teetering on the edge of. But I think it works.”
The Artful Dodger is streaming now on Disney+, as is Pistol.
