But his take on the character, informed by his deep soccer fandom, came to dictate much of how the character was written, he explained, right down to jokes that hinge on Dunster’s twanging accent. (One of the most memorable lines in Season 3 revolves around his singular pronunciation of a colloquial term for excrement.) Sudeikis encouraged the actors to “massage the text” so that it felt right for each of them, Dunster said, “whether that was to Anglify it, or Jamiefy it, whatever it needed.”
Dunster, who grew up in Reading, England, was drawn to acting from an early age, appearing in school productions that won him much-sought attention in class and at home. “I don’t want to put it down solely to my performance as Oliver in a Year 3 production at school, but that laid the foundation of me being a show-off,” he said.
Though he comes from a military background — both his brother and father served in the armed forces — he said his family supported his decision to pursue acting professionally by enrolling at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School. This was in part because, as he dryly explained, “they also knew I had zero academic skills, so they were like, ‘Yeah, mate, you’ve got nothing else going for you.’”
After graduating, Dunster took a job as a waiter at an Asian restaurant in Brixton, but after a single trial shift, he could tell it wasn’t for him. “I flocked, man — I had someone who was looking after me, and I still managed to screw everything up,” he said. On the bus ride home, he was dismayed: “I remember thinking, ‘What am I doing? I can’t be an actor if I have to do this.’”
Fortunately, he didn’t have to: He was offered a major role in the British period gangster film “The Rise of the Krays” (2015) almost immediately afterward, and just like that, Dunster went from anxious graduate to professional actor and has worked steadily ever since.
Calum Marsh
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