Douglas Hodge

Douglas Hodge (born 25 February 1960) is an English actor, director, and musician who trained for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Hodge is a council member of the National Youth Theatre for whom, in 1989, he co-wrote Pacha Mama's Blessing about the Amazon rain forests staged at the Almeida Theatre. Career Theatre Hodge has achieved great success on stage in plays by Harold Pinter, including No Man's Land at the Comedy Theatre in February 1993; Moonlight at the Almeida Theatre in September 1993; A Kind of Alaska, The Lover and The Collection at the Donmar Warehouse in May 1998; as Jerry in Betrayal at the Royal National Theatre's Lyttelton Theatre, in November 1998; and as Aston in The Caretaker at the Comedy Theatre in November 2000, co-starring Michael Gambon (Davies) and Rupert Graves (Mick), directed by Patrick Marber – for which he was nominated for an Olivier Award. Hodge admired Pinter and has spoken and written very highly of the man and his work, and offered himself as a "birthday present" on his 70th birthday, among many other things offering "My own complete friendship, loyalty and thanks. Manners, civility, celerity, precision, class and clarity." As his directorial debut at the Oxford Playhouse in 2004 Hodge chose a double bill of The Dumb Waiter and Other Pieces (the 1957 one-act play plus six of Pinter's sketches). In 2015, Hodge will make his debut as a Broadway director, helming a revival of Pinter's 1971 play Old Times. The production will star Clive Owen, Eve Best and Kelly Reilly. It is due to open at the American Airlines Theatre. Television With Peter Searles he co-wrote Pacha Mama's Blessing and Forest People, about the Amazon Rainforest, performed by the National Youth Theatre on BBC Television in 1989. Hodge received critical and popular acclaim in 1994 as Dr. Tertius Lydgate in the BBC's award-winning production Middlemarch, adapted by Andrew Davies from the novel by George Eliot and directed by Anthony Page. In the US it aired on Masterpiece Theatre in 1994. His other TV appearances include leading roles in Behaving Badly (1989); Capital City (1989–1990); A Fatal Inversion (1992); Bliss (1995); Only Fools and Horses (1996) The Uninvited (1997); The Scold's Bridle (1998); Shockers: Dance (1999); The Law (2000); the BBC serial adaptation of Trollope's The Way We Live Now (2001), as Roger Carbury; The Russian Bride (2001); Red Cap (2003–2004); Spooks (2005); ITV's 2007 adaptation of Mansfield Park, as Sir Thomas Bertram; and the made-for-TV film Lift, directed by James Hawes, a 2007 Hartswood Films production for BBC Four, as Paul Sykes, "a constantly exasperated, highly-strung middle-aged businessman with commitments.". In 2010, he appeared in the episode "The Restaurant" of the third series of the popular BBC sitcom Outnumbered as Brick Bolenger, an American therapist who is married to Auntie Angela (played by Samantha Bond). The character is involved in a story line of the fourth series in 2011, but never appears on screen. In 2012, Hodge had a prominent role in BBC drama One Night, he appeared in the conspiracy thriller miniseries Secret State, and the ITV-1 drama The Town. In 2016 he featured as Rex Mayhew in the BBC adaptation of John le Carre's The Night Manager. In 2017, he appeared in "Black Museum", an episode of the anthology series Black Mirror. He appeared as Inspector Bartholomew Rusk in the series Penny Dreadful.